Hi, Don.
I have to second what you said about requiring protective equipment for doing this kind of work. A few years ago, we had a late night fire at a house where there was no outside service disconnect. It is not accepted procedure for our Fire Department to attempt to remove a meter (especially one such as this which was passing tremendous fault currents through it from the burned-out wiring inside the house) for the reasons you mentioned. Before anyone could stop him, A young firefighter decided to "free-lance it" and remove the meter, while wearing only normal firefighting gear (hardly suitable for electric work). At the moment the meter jaw contact was broken, there was a spectacular flash [Linked Image] that scared &*&*$*$% out of other firefighters nearby. I still to this day don't know what saved the firefighter from quite literally having his face burned off.
Our PoCo has extremely slow response times when called to emergency service disconnects such as this. But your priorities are absolutely correct; I'd much rather lose a house than to lose a brother firefighter.

Mike (mamills)