Author - Kevin
Submitted By -The obvious is not always the truth!!
This is a little late but none the less important! I just read the article about the July 13 incident and it turned my stomach. I am a Lead Lineman and have been in the business for 18yrs. I stress and push Safety, give Trans. Connection workshops, Cable Locating, TDR, TTR, and am a CPR/First Aid Instructor for the Red Cross. The reason I tell you all of this is to hopefully get across that even the safest among us are not exempt from accidents and injury. Enough said!
The set-up: My duty partner and I were called to an outage on Sun. night July 1. The feeder is 750mcm urd. It goes 1/2mi. into an S&C Switchgear and has three more dist. lines leaving it. One goes to a water well, one to a sewer lift, and one to the residential overhead line. The residential customers were out, an S&C fuse was blown, and the main line fuse was blown. After checking it all out we refused everything and got them back on. Mon. July 2: A new duty crew went on another outage to the same place. They called me at home and told me what they had. I walked them through how to reroute and get everything back on. Tues. July 3: I took a TDR, a HighPot, Voltage indicator & TTR, and went to find the problem. I didn’t have my regular crew w/me that day. It was I, a lineman from my crew, a lineman from another crew, and three other foremen. The first thing that I did was to make sure that the duty crew from the night before had done as I had instructed. They did. Then I went to test it with the high voltage indicator. The battery was down! The tip was missing! And we didn’t have a spare! I looked again at the color tape, the tags on both ends of the cable that was parked out that I was going to work on, and the circuit labeling on the S&C. It was determined, through assumption, that it was the same cable and DEAD! I proceeded to unscrew the porcelain arc stinger from the elbow at the trans. I couldn’t get it so I pushed my hand in further to try. Still having trouble I pushed one more time and breached the porcelain! I had on safety glasses, hard hat and leather gloves. I was on my knees at the time. My left hand on the stinger and my right on the elbow w/ my last two fingers on the single strand ground wire that goes from the cable to the elbow. 7200v went phase to ground from one hand to the other and across my heart. Flash blindness from the explosion. I could see my hands going away from me as I flew back 5ft into the arms of another lineman, praying that my hands were still there as I could only see them going away from me. I never lost consciousness, and as I lay there was concerned about the safety of the other people as two of the phases were still Hot! I asked the person whose arms I lie in if my hands were still there! After the third time I got the courage to look and they were! I was life watched to a burn center. I was in A-phib for nine hours. They had tried two different drugs to bring me out of it but didn’t work. They had one more idea to try before they would have to re-shock me to try to bring me out of it. The combo worked! At 3 o’clock that next morning all of my pain had gone! From that time on, and through my 2mo. of healing , I never had any pain nor pain killers! The results: The leather gloves saved my hands from suffering bad burns. Safety glasses saved my eyes. I have very little scaring on my two left fingers and two right fingers. No noticeable deformities or abnormalities. The doctors said that 24 out of 25 people that go through what I did are disabled one way or another. I teach that 99.9% are maimed or die.
Conclusion: They call me mister safety around here and in other utilities, I don’t think so! If I were I would have waited until workable equipment had been brought to us. No matter how many times you’ve done it, nor who or how certain you are, in this business you can always get hurt. 90% of all accidents can be avoided. As for the cable, it was found that before my time they had spliced the cable, all three 3phase lines in the same ditch and had spliced the wrong cables together. They had also miss marked which cable went where. None the less it was nobody’s fault but mine, how stupid!
Thought for your life: The lineman who was standing next to the S&C heard the ping of the fuse blowing, then the below, then the three words that I yelled that he said he would never forget! OH GOD! OH GOD! OH GOD! I was already a believer and follower. We know several lineman who have been hit and are deformed for life, and for me to stand next to them and say that we both have gone through the same thing ought to make a believer out of anyone. If they aren’t a testimony of faith, then I am. I have no visible or physical problems! And I totally believe that it is by God’s grace that I am alive!
I have two children and a wonderful wife that I almost left behind because of a stupid mistake. And if it would have been one of my crewmen, I don’t know if I would still be able to do my job because of my stupid mistake!
God Bless, Happy Holidays, and take care!
Kevin