Hi all,

Just to give a bit of background to this story, basically the government over here(Ireland) decided to build a tunnel to link Dublin Port with the M50 motorway that goes around the city to cut down on the amount of trucks going through the city.

Anyway, I read in a newspaper last Monday that a Polish worker on the project was seriously injured when he used a hacksaw to cut through a conduit in the tunnel which happened to have a 10KV cable inside it. Apparantly nobody knew what the pipe was for so they cut it anyway. The paper said that somebody from the constuction company had been sacked following the accident. They didn't say who but I'm thinking it was the Polish guys supervisor who told him to cut the pipe.

It's hard to believe that something so stupid could happen. Nobody took the time to try and find out what the pipe was and it's only luck that the Polish guy wasn't killed.

Ross

Guess he didn't have a tick tracer?

They don't work when the conductor is in metal conduit.
Don

I would love to know what was said to get him to saw into the conduit. When someone points at a pipe and says "I don't know what that does" it generaly doesn't inspire a person to cut it in half.

I mean, unless they thought the thing was totally abandon and empty, what other excuse could they have to cut it? Water, sewage, gas, fuel oil, electrical cables, telecom cables, high-pressure air, hydraulic fluid--just about anything you could put in a pipe would give you a darn good reason not to cut through it.

-John

I don't know how it works with immigrant "labor" in Europe but I am sure if you told one of the guys here to "cut that pipe" they would just say "si" and whack away at it.
My favorite builder wants to write a book about dumb stuff people have done on her jobs because they didn't know any better.

All HV or unindentified cables require to be spiked for safety reasons.
A standard 10 or 11 kV feeder cable has an average faultlevel of around 250 MVA which is about the same as a Boeing 747 taking off at the airport.
That guy was lucky to be alive. The guy who told him to cut the pipe or conduit should get the sack.