Author - old man

Submitted By - old man My partner and I were on call at a rural coop in Michigan . We had been working about 20 hours straight doing little lightning outages , trees on the service , and the like when dispatch called us with "one more" . Apparently the cable company told him that lightning had come through the power line  and smoked his tv and a bunch of other stuff . Well we all heard that one before . I asked dispatch to confirm that he had an outage because by the time my apprentice and I made the hour and a half drive from one end of our service area to the other where he wasat  it would be 2 am and I didn't want to wake the guy up to fill out a voltage complaint form . I figured we would go home get some sleep and talk to him in the morning . Dispatch confirmed the he had power but when his dog peed on the house he got shocked! Well we could wait to see this ! When we got there we found an old house trailer with a 60 amp meter on a cedar service pole . We talked to the old boy and he told us that when his dog peed on the side of the house he got the shit kicked out of him . We checked the meter base and found that his nuetral was rotted out between the meter socket and his main breaker and that he had broke his ground from the panel to the ground rod with a lawn mower . Well that took the responsability for the smoked stuff off us. Made repairs on all his stuff and got ready to leave when I figured on a hunch to check the dog getting shocked a little closer . I took my fluke to the spot where the beagle got it , put one end in the ground and the other on the trailer and sure enough 100 volts ! What the hell is going on? Time to back track everything on meter good , new ground , extra ground rod . Look in his panel again and find an old piece of romex going down in the ground and running to his well pump. It turns out the wire ran about a foot from the trailer and he had ripped it up with his snow plow and come spring the ground got moist enough to  let it leak enough into the ground that when his dog cocked his leg on the trailer it completed the circuit right through his junk . Ahoo.