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ANOTHER U.G. ACCIDENT

This thing happened to me about 15 years ago but I still think about it sometimes, I was a Journeyman but still green. We were called on an outage about 2:00 AM, it was on a three phase underground comercial run. One gate was down, B Phase. So we started sectionalising that phase, we cut it in half and the fuse blew. Then again and so on until we got it down to where it was the first span from the riser pole. By this time it was morning the crews were comming in to work so the boss sent us to eat breakfast. When we got back from eating they had the vault open and were getting ready to pull the new cable in. This was when the Fluke digital meters were new and our sub station guy had one and he was testing everything he could with the new toy.I was standing about twenty feet from the vault and one of the apprentice had a pair of circle cutters in his hands getting ready to cut the elbow off when the guy with the Fluke said “why don’t you let me test that cable to make sure it’s faulted before we pull it in. The apprentice held the elbow while the sub dude and another lineman put the probe of the meter in the elbow. The explosion blew the front of the shirts off of the two men in front of the elbow and they were covered in carbon, It blackened their glasses and one of them hollered “what was that?” and started running blind. Copper splattered me on the side of the head and left my ear ringing for the rest of the day. The flash burns were first and second degree and they both recovered from it. The reason the man with the meter wasn’t electrocuted was that they were standing on cement sidewalk. The fuse that blew was C phase. The tagging was wrong (B phase on the pole and C phase in the hole) and we had been working the wrong phase all night. So if you again, like always, you got to use the phaseing set to make sure it’s dead and then ground it before you put your little hands on it.