The amount of power that can be delivered by the generator is more than sufficient to kill someone working on the lines.
Agreed there, add to that the probability that the cause of the outage may be a storm, and you have a soaking wet lineman up a pole, probably at 3 am on a sunday, who is really *not* expecting 7200 volts from a transformer that's disconnected from the grid. Given the howling winds likely, he/she is also probably not going to hear the generator. Agreed, safety is the lineman's responsibility, but there's no excuse for using something suicidally and homicidally dangerous when transfer switches are very readily available.
