ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area On the job mishaps/ screw-ups

not me either, but my old instructor used to tell us about an aluminum rolling mill in his juristiction of which he had authority at the time. Electrician was screwing the 1900 blank cover back on to 277volt lighting j-box. shorted to ground. The ground-fault on the main had never been properly set so the main opened. Well this place needed an orderly shutdown. Equipment started fire and the whole place burnt to the ground.

Talk about sinking feeling. I imagine that one felt like falling into a bottomless pit.

--->BUMP!<----
Wow some of the previous ones posted are good, here is one , although not as good but I find entertaining..
Wiring a parking lot for lights.. Journeyman shows up and has the excavator start digging between the two red stakes (assumed that was the markings for the outer edge of the island).. When the Foreman shows up he stops the excavator, and has a chat with the journeyman.. Excavator starts filling in the trench... Turns out the journeyman failed to read the markings on the stakes and had the trench 1.5 meters in the wrong direction..

Same job, same journeyman.. instructing the excavator operator where to dig for the conduits... The journeyman has the map with the locates in HIS HAND, and still has the poor operator excavate in the vicinity of a 2" gas main... Excavator found the main! $5G later!

Same job, Foreman and engineers mess up:
We were on the line truck digging out the 24" holes for the concrete bases... Foreman is saying "Deeper"... We heard a funny noise then noticed some blue plastic coming out of the hole... Oops, we found the center of a new storm sewer! It is exactly where its supposed to be according to prints, and so are our massively heavy concrete bases for these lights... One right on top of the other!


Same job SAME journeyman... Payback for him, entertainment for us:

We had just set the pole on top of its concrete base and said journeyman started adjusting the nuts and fastening hardware at the bottom in attempts to "level" this pole.. He cranked and wrenched until his level said the pole was straight but it looked WAY off.... Moved his level to another side and did the same thing, cranking and wrenching.. This went on for 35 minutes until he eyeballed it and made it look good.. Too bad the pole he had his level on was TAPERED.. too bad he didn't realize his level was not!

I was distracted by the owner of a commercial laundry asking me technical questions while fixing the solenoid valve on a 100 pound dryer and missed the step where you turn the gas off. He decided to leave me alone to do my job after seeing half his dryer become engulfed in flames.

Working in a pet food factory doing motor control wotk and dropped my bundle of zip ties onto a conveyor of dog food headed for thew bagging area. By the time I got down and told the foreman it was to late. They had to shut down the line and tear every bag open to find the zip ties.

One of our residential guys was doing a service change on a home as he was on the roof a freak ice storm blew through coating everything, including him and the roof in a matter of minutes. We got a help call at the shop to send the bucket truck over to get him down as he could not move from his spot on the roof to get to his ladder.

Years ago in Houston had an electrician stop by the local bar on the way home. He had a little to much to drink and got pretty mouthy. He ended up tossed out of the bar and laying in the parking lot. He did not like the way he was treated so he pulled the estension ladder off the truck and proceeded to cut the drop. He did a pretty good job taped the ends and did not cut the neutral (had to fix it the next day). When the lights went out some pretty big old boys came out of the bar mad that they had to stop drinking. Lucky for him the police showed up and he thought it might be better to go with the cops than try to talk to the crowd in the parking lot.
After his wife bailed him out the boss seemed to find a lot of jobs for him that involved hand digging ditches.

A few years ago, I was installing baseboard heaters and had to drill down through the floor. My apprentice would cut a square out of the carpet, then drill the hole. The last hole, he didn't make the cut quite big enough. The bit grabbed one string of the carpet and pulled it the whole length of the room. The owners got new carpeting out of the deal.

One more.

This one happened to the boss, thankfully.
This was before satellite communication. My old boss was out trenching some lights for a football field. Everything had been marked or so he thought. He had gone about 150' when he noticed a phone cable that he had cut. Nothing was marked there, but he stopped and dug it up anyway. As he was down in the hole, holding the ends of the cable, someone yelled "Stop, right there". He looked up and there were 4 guys with
M-16's pointed at him. Turns out that simple phone cable was a Department of Defense communication cable to one of the local missile silos.

I suppose this may be a wee bit off topic because when the guys did my new driveway the electric service drop is the only thing they didn't break. They got the phone, the TV cable and the water in 3 separate incidents. Then they left me with a dozen footprints in the concrete.

I was doing a remodel for a customer. We were changing Gasoline Dispensers, POS, Signage and canopy lights etc. We're changing 2 of the 4 dispensers while station is still operating on the other 2. The new Dispensers should be phased with the POS equipment so I move some stuff around in the panel to get enough room to get all electronics on the same phase. The problem was the new stuff and old stuff were now phased differently. We were testing the new equipment when a customer came in and turned on the old equipment, pooof out came the magic smoke Thankfully the new equipment had cube relays and the old had triacs, the cube relays won:P