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Monday, 30 July 2007 19:00

UNDER GROUND

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Under Ground

This is another close call on residential under ground distribution. It was a wet and cool early winter day and we had an outage in a residential neighborhood upon arriving the single phase 65amp dip was open. We had ran the fault indicators and had determined the bad run of cable. Before closing the Normal open to restore power we had pulled the elbow off the transformer and removed the probe to examine it for fault conditions to rule out a bad bushing well plug. It was s almost lunch time and we were going to be able to get everyone back on by closing the normal open and isolating the bad cable between the two transformers and reclosing the 65 amp dip leaving only the bad cable deenegized between the two transformers. After closing the 65 amp fuse we took lunch. Now remember that we had removed the probe from the elbow and had it in a stand off this we thought was the bad cable. After lunch the line foreman walked to the transformer pulled the elbow of the standoff and cut the bleed wire off the concentric at that point he pulled the elbow off the cable with his leather gloves, the bleed wire made contact with the termination and blew the 65 amp fuse. HE WAS VERY LUCKY!!! The cable was marked wrong and we had plugged the bad cable back in on the transformer thinking we were heating it up. Had we not already removed the probe to inspect it earlier while the dip was open his first move would have been to put a wrench in there to remove the probe and I'm sure he would be dead now. DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING IS TAGGED CORRECTLY!!! We made several mistakes! 1) we assumed that the cable was tagged correctly 2] we did not verify before we took lunch that we had voltage on the transformer 3} we did not test and ground the cable. Personally I learned a great deal from this near miss and that is any one can mark cable wrong the direction of feed can be changed at any time and nothing is dead until I ground it. NEVER NEVER assume an underground cable is dead until you have verified it for yourself don't take the trouble man's word your foreman's word the supers word if you are working on that cable YOU ground it the life you save will be your own.

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