Author -

Witness to a fatality

The only fatality I was witness to was in 1972. I was new to distribution and was working for a contractor doing a conversion from 2400/4160 to 7200/12470. The piece of line we were working on was a piece of single phase and we were adding 2 new phases and intended to convert to 4 wire wye 12470. I was in a bucket and the senior lineman was on the pole. This pole was a single phase de pole with a transformer on it and open wire secondary. WE had strung a new wire from the back of the pole and spliced the de straight thru. We intended to move this phase to the end of the arm and temporarily jumper the transformer via a mechanical bypassing the pot fuse. This was intended to be a very short temporary thing. The Co. whose property we were working on routinely paralleled a lot of their transformers and also transformer banks,via jonny balls and sec. fuses. It was just something you just had to be aware of. I had the mechanical in the bucket and after the man on the pole attached the mech. after skinning the 5kv wire that ran from the bottom of the cutout I was going to place it on the phase we had moved to the outside pin position. The man on the pole knocked the cutout open and cut the 5kv wire at the bottom of the cutout. We were both wearing rubber gloves. I did not witness the actual contact as it happened very quickly. The next thing I noticed was when he dropped his knife and the jumper and looked at me and said,"I don!t know what in the hell I got into." In an instant his eyes rolled back and his head tipped back with his hard hat hitting the ground. He stood perfectly on the pole but he was unconscious. The man on the ground began to yell,"Get him down",Get him down". At first I tried to give him mouth to mouth but his jaws were tightly clenched. I then cut his safety and dumped him into the bucket with me and took him to the ground. A nearby hiway patrolman ran over and began giving him mouth to mouth while the groundman did chest compressions. An ambulance came and took him away. He was DOA. The doctor said his heart fibrillated. He had a tiny red mark on the heel of his and a small mark on his knee where he touched a piece of duplex that ran to a lite. His rubber gloves were folded in half and stuffed into his ditty bag. Evidently having trouble opening the folding blade klein knife he had removed his rubbers, opened the knife and then grabbed the wire and cut into it barehanded. The knife of course was not insulated. The pot was backfeeding thru the openwire secondary. I got an insulated knife after that.