Author -
Submitted By -Grounding Elbow
I am a journeyman lineman with 10 years in the trade. This happened shortly after I got out of tech school. We had an underground fault on a section of cable and were using a thumper to locate it. we could not find the fault so one of the linemen went to the other shop to get their thumper. While he was gone the other two linemen decided they were going to refuse the line to see if it would hold. I stayed at the cabinet where we had the thumper hooked up earlier. I was standing in front of the cabinet but decided to go in the shade since it was near 100 degrees that day. Shortly after I moved three balls of fire came out of the cabinet. The other two linemen forgot to remove the grounding elbow and had closed the cutout. The two linemen returned and didn't even know what had happened until I told them. At the time I really didn't know how close a call I had had but I learned a valuable lesson. As journeymen we have a responsibility to make sure everybody is informed about what's going on especially starting apprentices because they learn from US!!