COIMBATORE: A 25-year-old male wild elephant was electrocuted on a private land adjacent to the Karadimadai forest in the Madukkarai forest range on Friday morning. A burn scar found on its trunk helped forest officials confirm that the tusker was electrocuted.
The tusker received shock as it likely grabbed one of the three-phase wires of the HT transformer line over a private garden about 100 metres outside the boundary of the Karadimadai forest in the Coimbatore Forest Division, said forest department sources.
TNEB Executive Engineer assessed standards of the transformer in the presence of Conservator of Forests and ATR Field Director D Venkatesh, DFO N Venkatesh Prabhu, and Madukkarai Forest Range Officer R Arunkumar.
“The poles on which the transformer is mounted should be 30 feet high, with 5 ft embedded in the ground and 25 ft above the ground level. An HT transformer should be placed at a height of 10 ft from the ground surface, and the LT line should be drawn in the opposite direction of the HT transformer.
In this case, the elephant could easily grab the line as the transformer was mounted only at a height of 10 ft,” said a forest department official.
“Often elephants avoid coming near HT transformers as they usually emit a noise. However, in this case, the elephant could easily approach the transformer and received shock as it pulled a wire from the three-phase HT line,” the official added.