If the decision is to trip the circuit breaker (whether or not an alarm can be transmitted), then a second, less direct, method of alerting the dispatcher to the problem exists - the report of an outage by customers. A telephoned report of a wire down or of an outage (assuming the HIF is accompanied by loss of load) has long been the traditional and virtually the only means a utility had to detect a high impedance fault. It remains a very useful means of detecting and/or locating a downed conductor. While the technology for detecting HIF is becoming commercially available, locating them will still depend on traditional patrolling methods. In the past, a HIF would be found by a layman's report of a downed wire, or by a utility patrol initiated by an outage complaint. Even with HIF detectors, this will still be the case.