We buy electrical wire in Texas City.

Salt air and what it does to a jacket

Galveston Bay air carries salt, and salt does not need a storm to do damage. It settles on a jacket, holds moisture against the surface, and works at the places where the cable has been handled: the ends, the bends, the spots where a wrap was cut and the conductor left exposed. The damage starts small and stays hidden.

Terminations fail first. A lug corrodes under its own insulation, the connection runs warm, and by the time anyone notices, the cable has been cooked back a few feet from the end. That is why a cut-back end on coastal cable is looked at closely rather than trimmed and forgotten, and why the last three feet of a run often decide the grade. Coastal cable is trimmed back further before reuse than the same construction inland, because the damage sits at each end rather than along the middle.

Refinery row and the cable that leaves it

Texas City's plants run refining, chemical, storage and port operations side by side, and the electrical work that supports them produces the usual spread: five and fifteen kV feeder, tray cable, motor lead cable, instrumentation and grounding. The city is small. The plant footprint around it is not, and neither is the cable it replaces.

Surplus from a coastal plant usually comes with an atmosphere story. A reel that sat in an open yard for three years has a chalky jacket and rusted flanges. A reel that lived in a warehouse looks new. Same cable, different condition, and the difference is visible in one photograph taken in daylight.

Age matters here more than in an inland district. Cable from a building that has stood since the 1970s may be rubber or lead covered, and both are handled differently from modern XLPE. Photographs of the jacket print are the quickest way to place the era a lot came from.

Ike, flooding and the water line on a reel

Hurricane Ike is still the reference point here for water damage. Storm surge covered low ground across the bay front, and cable stored at ground level went under. Reels that survived were usually indoors, on racks, or on ground that sits a little higher than the rest of the yard.

The lesson stuck. When a lot from Texas City has been wet, sellers usually say so before they are asked, and that is useful. Water in a stranded conductor does not leave on its own, and cable that sat submerged for weeks is graded honestly rather than optimistically. Nobody is served by guessing at it.

• How high the water reached on the reel
• Whether the reel was standing or lying flat
• If the ends were sealed, taped or left open
• How long the cable stayed wet
• Whether the jacket shows salt bloom or cracking

Send one photograph of the flange and one of the cut end. Between them they show most of what salt and water have done.

The dike, the port and older installations

The dike runs along the bay side of the city, and behind it sit the port, the storage terminals and a good deal of older electrical infrastructure. Some of that cable has been in service for decades, and when it finally comes out it is not surplus in any useful sense. It is salvage.

Salvage is still bought. It is graded on metal content, jacket condition and whether any length can be reused, and the answer is often that some pieces can and the rest cannot. A lot does not have to be uniform to be worth collecting, and mixed salvage is normal on this side of the bay.

• Roughly how old the installation was
• Whether the jacket is rubber, lead or XLPE
• Copper or aluminium conductor
• Corrosion visible at the cut end
• Whether the cable was in service or abandoned

Old cable can hold surprises at the cut. Photograph the end rather than describing it.