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Submitted By -Bad Tags
How many times do we as lineman, kind of take things for granted. I hope this will help us all on how important it is to check and double check, before you do any work on underground cable switch gear. The job was to take some equipment out of service so that we could pull in some new cables. The cables are to go in a S&C switch gear, PMH 11. (cables are 750kcmil with 1/3 neut.) We started to de-energize our in coming and out going cables, starting with the 1/0's going to a four way t-tap feeding a waste-water lift station. The fuses on this wire were pulled and tested de-energized by our phase tester. The next step was for us to pull and park the elbows coming from the PMH 11 and apply our grounds after testing that the cables were de-energized in the t-tap. The next step taken was to energize the four way t-tap with the split that was marked and park in this t-tap. (cables were mark with caution tags because we had two different circuits in the t-tap ). We energized the four way with the split, but the waste-water lift station did not come up . After finding out that the lift station was still out of power, we regrouped and found out that we just re-energized the cables to the PMH 11 by checking with the phase tester. The cables in the four way t-tap were miss marked and some one could have gotten hurt or even killed by the miss marking. We were very lucky. So don't take things for granted . Lets use the equipment that we have. It saved someone's life as far as I'm concern. Do not let your guard down when it comes to underground work. WORK SAFE!!!