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Electrical Contact On 12.5kv Underground Line

This is a contact accident that happened to our crew about 2 years ago. I was the foreman. I've been doing line work for 26 years. I hope bringing this out might help prevent someone else from having to go through what this crew has endured. We where assigned the routine task of repairing a bad run of underground primary between 2 transformers, just like we had already done 2 times earlier in the week. But first we had to set 2 poles for one of our big customers so I gave lineman #2 the work order so he could go check the location of the bad u.g. to see if we could get digging equipment into the job sight, while myself and lineman #3 and #4 set the poles. After we got done we all met back at the headquarters to pick up a backhoe and went to the job location of the bad u.g. When we all arrived we walked into the back yard to see where the thumper had marked the ground with paint to show where the bad spot was. I looked at the small one line I was given with the work order to see which way we needed to go to place grounds. I decided that myself and lineman#3 would go place the grounds while the other 2 lineman would unload the backhoe and start digging. We knew we had one primary and one hot secondary in the same ditch. Due to the distance between transformers and getting into other backyards to place the grounds or maybe its just because the guys are just fast workers when we returned to where they were digging they already had ditch open and the secondary exposed and the primary spotted. In just a few minutes they had the primary exposed and was looking for the hole in the cable where it had blown out. After looking the wire over and cleaning it with a wet rag lineman #4 decided to cut the neutral to get a better look at the cable thinking that the hole was on the bottom side and he would be able to find it better if the neutral was removed. After that he still couldn't find the bad spot so he decided to cut the cable to get a better look. At this time I stated I wasn't ready to cut the cable because the thumper might have missed his mark, which is rare but does happen because of the soil conditions. Lineman#4 said that he had nicked the cable with the shovel and it would have to be spliced anyway. I agreed, but was still concerned that we hadn't found the bad spot and something didn't feel right. So lineman#4 told lineman#3 to hand him the cable cutters but lineman#3 picked up the cutters and jumped in the ditch along side of lineman#4 who was holding the cable where he wanted it cut. By now you've probably figured out that the cable we had been working on was actually hot. There were 2 cables in the same ditch. The one we had grounded was later found to be just a couple of inches on the other side of the secondary still covered. When lineman#3 cut the cable there was a big explosion, it knocked us all back, lineman#3 jumped out of the ditch and when the smoke cleared I saw lineman#4 who had been holding the cable in his hand, laying in the ditch unconscious. Seeing his feet were clear of the cable by 3 or 4 inches I jumped into the ditch and laid him back to see if he was breathing. It was a hot 95 degrees and we were all sweaty and he had a "T" shirt on. This was before we were required to wear F.R. clothing. When I laid him back the front of his shirt was gone and his beard was burnt off on one side of his face. You could smell the burnt flesh and hair. It took several tries to get him out of the ditch because he was so slippery and his skin would come off in your hands. We finally got him out and lay on the ground when shortly he started to come to. He had a 3-inch rip in the seam of his jeans at the hip where the electricy exited his body. He had blown an 80A fuse. He was burnt over 65% of his body with 3rd and 4th degree burns. He spent 2 weeks in ICU an another 2 weeks in the burn unit after that. Although he had suffered the pain it affected all of us, and our families. I ask myself, how could I have let this happen? How can you face the other guys at work? How can you face his wife and his mother and dad? Why didn't I catch the other cable on the one line? The one line wasn't clear, but I should have caught it because the transformer was 200' out of line with a cable in and out. No matter what you say to the family you can't change anything. And the worse thing is that there could have been 2 dead men that day, and it could have been any one of us. The good thing is that he's all right, he has a few scars and big one on his hip, and he's had 7 surgeries since that day including one on his eyes. I honestly believe the lord was watching over all of us that day. So don't think that an accident just affects the one who got injured, it affects everyone around you. Its something you got to live with every day of your life. So if you see somebody taking a shortcut but you don't want to say anything because you are afraid you'll piss them off, then think about having to face their family, wife or kids, think about having to look at them in their coffin. If someone is doing something you don't agree with tell him or her and talk about it, at least you tried. Don't assume anything is dead until you test it dead, in this case we should have been wearing rubber gloves until we had tested it dead with a cable spike. You can bet we use the spike now, but we didn't have one then. We should have had a detailed tailboard to pass the one line around and let everyone look it over, maybe somebody on the crew would have seen the other cable. Now I run a copy of every job for the other truck to look at so everybody knows what is going on, this helps them to help me see things I might miss. Bottom line is, we are all grown men and women with a job to do, to work together for the customer and company. We've got to make saftey the top priority or everybody will suffer. Thank you and work safe If you have any comments you can e-mail me at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.