The downside of working with high-voltage equipment

Gordon got a memo yesterday from the superintendent. It seems we had a couple of near-tragedies at the beginning of the month. First, a guy put a ladder up on an energized breaker instead of the de-energized one the guys were working on. Then, a guy drove a piece of machinery underneath another energized section of equipment, where he shouldn't have been in the first place.

I shared this info with some of my guys this morning. They'd heard of both incidents, but they also claimed that the same guy was involved in both of these near-misses. They didn't name names, but through their discussion of said incidents, I was able to figure out whom they meant.

He's a nice guy, reserved and fairly kind. He seems more mature than about half the guys we have in the apprentice program, but he is new to the kind of maintenance work we do here and his inexperience came out in these two close calls. Just in terms of personality, he isn't the first guy you'd expect to put a ladder up on an energized breaker. In fact, when I told my Northern counterpart about the "incidents," she immediately suspected one of my "cocky" cut-ups was at fault. Not so-- the cocky one was among those in my office, discussing the whole business with his mates with the mixture of bravado, scorn, and real apprehension you'd expect from a pack of twenty-something guys.

I realize working on the transmission system can be dangerous. Even if I didn't have a healthy respect for the power of 345,000 volts from the get-go, the stories Gordon and the other DECO veterans have told me would have given me a graphic idea of how bad an accident on the job can be.

I'll need to write about the Crestwood fire sometime.

The prospect of somebody dying on the job is always in the back of my mind. Even more present is the reality that many of my co-workers are, statistically speaking, nearing the end of what this business calls the "normal life cycle." One of the North operators had a major illness this summer, though he's expected to fully recover. One of my South guys went back into retirement after four of his contemporaries from DECO died in a brief time-frame. He opened his copy of the DECO retirees' magazine one month and found all four of their obituaries. He decided life was too short not to enjoy the retirement he'd already earned.

Mortality is something you live with. That's true for you people who don't work on power lines, too. Whether Americans can stand it or not, death is not optional.

That doesn't mean stupid accidents are any less stupid. One of the guys I work with daily, a guy I am fond of, a guy who showed me how to assemble a breaker valve during lunch break one Friday, nearly turned himself into a crispy critter. Twice.

Chirpy says that he's never seen a young guy accidentally kill himself, that it's always the older guys who get overconfident and take shortcuts.

Not very comforting, ne?