Author -
Submitted By -In Your Face
I would like to relate a little story. This really happened (though I'm not too proud of it) and should serve as a little lesson to those of us who tend to get a little lazy, or bend the rules a little here and there.
Have you ever pulled a temporary service into a pad mount transformer? There's a little knock-out type plug on the side of the pad-mount that you unscrew a backing plate off of, and using a coupler you can run a piece of core-flex through it.
Well, dumb-ass here decides to do the whole job hot.
I open the box and open the hole in the side, and start pulling the service through. There’s the cable with four number 10s, and wrapped around the outside is one number 6 bare copper ground wire.
Remember! Stupid-ass here is wearing no leather gloves, and no hard-hat.
The number 6 makes the cable slightly too big to go through the hole, so I gotta put some effort into it. I'm kneeling in front of the bug, and pulling the cable in when.... ok. Picture the situation...
I'm bare handed, bare headed, grounded copper conductor in my hands, knees in the dirt, leaning into a hot pad-mount transformer.
And for those here who have never been in the front of a pad-mount bug, there's three buss bars sticking right out in front. Hot and un-insulated.
So I pull just hard enough to contract my abs just hard enough to bend my torso just hard enough to bring my forhead into contact with the 120 buss bar.
I can't tell you how many muscles you have in your face, or in your scalp, and neck and shoulders or even in your bloody ears, but I guarantee that I felt each and every one of them that day!
The shock sent me flying backwards. I had an apprentice with me, and you can probably guess how freaked-out he was. I picked myself up and started laughing like a fucking madman. I'm not sure what scared that trainee more, me getting a poke right in the face, or my reaction to it.