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Submitted By - 7,200 volts primary pulled up with a post hole auger

On June 7th,1999 at approximately 4:00 pm, a local landowner was replacing fence posts. He had called in earlier in the year for line locates located and marked for the owner. He was replacing a corner fence post. He had dug down approximately five and a half feet, to set post and he then noticed that there was a big wire pulled up from the hole.

The man is very lucky to still be living. He was not electrocuted in the least bit.

Maybe it was the dirt in the hole that helped or not, I don't know. All I know is that it took about seven hours to do the repair and run new primary line underground. In all honesty, the landowner should not have dug so deep.

We had "fun", we had to dig out the junction box at one end and rebuild the other one. In the attempt to find the conduit that held the old primary, we found the telephone buried line the hard way. We split it with the backhoe. What fun, right? So now we had the telephone company to join in with our late night.

There was about a dozen of us. Five of us the chief of police was in the hole using the shovel. We pulled the old wire out ,and at the same time we pulled the new primary in. What took the longest time was locating the old conduit.

To make a long story short, we managed to get the power back on and no one got hurt in this outage. Moral of the story: Don't bury corner posts more than three feet- for short spans of fence.