Some very good comments here, thanks for starting the thread Sparky.
To be fair, I've only ever had two incidents that stand out in the whole time I've been working in the electrical trade here.
The first being during my training as an industrial electrician, myself and one of the site electricians were replacing a motor control cabinet on one of the large conveyer belt drives, this was done live to keep the rest of the plant going at the time.
We coned off the area, this was way back before PPE and AF suits, you just wore safety glasses and fire retardant overalls.
The other guy Pete, went to use a Crescent and dropped the thing and it fell across the 3 2000A bus-bars feeding 5 of these motor control cabinets, the explosion was awful until it cleared.
His overalls caught fire and I pulled him out of the area, I sustained minor burns to my legs, after that incident, all un-insulated tools got banned from the Electrical Department.
The worst electric shock I have had to this day happened about 20 years ago and it was in a house, just down the road from here.
I was sent to this place to install an extractor fan in this ladies bathroom on a Friday afternoon.
The lady said she wanted it to come on with the light in the bathroom and it needed to have a 3 minute run-on time.
So I pulled the fuse for the circuit which took out most of the lights in the house and set the fuse carrier up on the meter.
I then got up in the roof and cut the lighting feed cable and proceeded to make up a junction box for the fan feed, as I went to strip back the phase and neutral conductors of the feed cable to make the terminations, I had 230V between my left and right hands, I could not let go of the wires as the roof was quite low where I was working.
That 50Hz buzzing in my head is something I will never ever forget and I could feel my eyes closing, I moved to the right and fell through the ceiling to break contact with the wires which clashed as I fell and blew the pole fuse out at the road.
Upon investigation, the lady said she put the fuse back in because she couldn't read her newspaper and then began berating me for the hole in her ceiling and the fibreglass batts that were now in her bath.
I finished the job and fixed the ceiling, but I was not the "full quid" for a few days after that shock though.
