Sometimes that's what it takes . I sometimes wish apprenticeship courses would take all the noobs to some safe environment where the instructors could demonstrate what AIC can do

But i digress....

30 odd yrs back in a small electrical room i turned a 30K 480/208 step down on, and it went boom so loud i lost any hearing, and flashed so hard i lost my sight

I had to exist the room via 'right hand search' , which was a FF technique taught to me, i'll personally thank the inventor of crash door hardware if he's available....

Although i sustained no other injuries (the Xfomer had contorted, but didn't shrapnel) being blind for 5 minutes was a real bad experience for me

I realize i'm older now , and these might seem like 'rockin' chair stories' to the lads starting out, yet i feel somewhat obligated to pass them on

Anyone care to help me out?

~Sparky , older and a lot less bolder.....

My friend tested the operation of Multilin ground fault protection on a 12Kv line with ratchet cable cutters. It shut down the equipment and didn't damage the cutters - or my friend. Maybe a lot of things had to line up for that to happen. The cable had ground fault protection, the handles of the cutter were non-conductive and the cutters maintained contact with the shield as they slowly moved through the insulation toward the conductor. Or, maybe it was just luck.

My most significant scary thing wasn't high voltage, it wasn't even 120v. it was 1.5vDC but at about 150 amps. People can get very sloppy when the voltage is confused with a flashlight battery. The guy I was working with got his wedding ring across 2 bus bars on that supply. It was white hot in less than a second. We yanked him off the bus and doused it with coffee because that was what we had handy. The paramedics had to cut it off to treat the burn. He didn't lose the finger but it was never right again.
I have not worn a piece of metal on my body since.

My biggest wake up call was when I got hung in the neutral on a 277 volt circuit.
Was doing a renovation to an older commercial building. The building had a "crawl space" that was about 4 foot tall with dirt floor. You had to walk all the way around the building to the rear to gain access then climb your way through conduits and plumbing pipes to get to where I was going. it was a real pain in the butt.
There were some new light circuits with exit / emergency lights on them stubbed into a junction box down in the crawl space.
I routinely arrived to the site around 6 am and opened it up and started working. The GC and everyone else didn't get there until 7 am. I had turned on some light circuits and noticed a couple exit / emergency lights were not working. I automatically figured I crossed up the neutrals in the j - box down in the crawl space. I left the circuits on and went to crawl my way back to the j box. Sure enough I had made the splices up wrong. I thought about climbing out and walking around the building and turning off the circuit, then walking back around and climbing back through . I figured the heck with that, I can resplice this hot in less time then it would take to climb out of here.

NOt to sure exactly what I did but I do remember standing there with my arms frozen up ion that box, getting shocked. The entire time I was thinking " you are going to die if you do not get away from this" Not sure how I got away from that box but when I came to I was laying in the dirt, my heart beating like it was coming out of my chest , my arms, neck and shoulders hurt like hell and I had one hell of a headache.
I don't know if I was able to jerk away and hit my head on a cast iron drain and was knocked out, or I passed out and relaxed and fell hitting my head.
I never did anything like that again.

wow, great stories guys....~S~

~s~
I agree with you about training the noobs. I did when I was at VoTech. Night one, a nice video from Bussmann showing what not to do, and if you did, what will happen.

Interesting, a few ‘no shows’ on nite 2. Guess I scared them off, or I may have prevented a situation. I have seen the results of a few bad faults that caused injury, and some that caused severe property damages.

One recent, ‘repair to a 1600 amp, 480 Pringle switch’ while it was hot on line side. No POCO shutdown, no permit for work, so IF they called POCO to shutdown, they would not get restoration o service without insp & approval and POCO cut in card issued.

Now, ‘service tech’ is installing some linkage for handle, linkage piece touches hot leg, and......boom. Lucky, he only had severe burns on 1 hand, arm, facial, neck and metal flakes in both eyes. The EMTs cut the nylon glove remains off his hands. His PPE gear was all in the room, still in the bag, his face shield was still in the truck.

Had another two years ago that was in the burn unit for 3 months.

looking back, I could easily have been that serv tech so many times it's downright embarrassing HotOne. In fact i didn't even know what 70E existed until i was a Jman. My EMS tenure ,witness to some nasty and a few unfortunately fatal burn victims, was really the only 'wake up' i had, other than my own electrical debaucheries.

This trade could use a few more instructors like you to put the fear of God into the noobs vs. the complacence if not downright ignorance sorts of my vintage went about with in our day

~S~

~s~
My ooops move back in the day....
Using scissor lift in whose, ballasts & bulb total replacement job. Lowered lift, drove outside to empty bulbs, boxes, etc., unto dumpster. (No recycle back then)

Raised lift to throw stuff down into dumpster. ind takes some cardboard into parking lot. I unhook lanyard, open gate & climb down the 3 steps. OOOPS, I forgot that I was raised up, did the backward swan dive to the blacktop. Split my head like a ripe melon.

Ride with EMTs to the ER, 28 stiches, and one heck of a concussion.

Not an AF incident, but my OOOPS.

Ouch

head wounds bleed , lots of vasculature , always looks like a horror show HotOne ~S~

I haven't had any close calls involving electricity and I want to keep that way. A couple of my co-workers have gotten bit by 347V and lived to talk about it. Between the Arc Flash Safety courses and hearing first hand about the close calls others have had I've been safe enough to keep out of harms way, so far.

Close calls with metal objects is a different story.

When I was apprenticing in construction I seen a contractor from another company using a Milwaukee portable bandsaw. I asked if I could try it to shorten a piece of 3/8" threaded rod that was already screwed into the concrete ceiling. The contractor agreed and even held the bottom of the threaded metal steady while I proceeded to cut it. While I was cutting I was thinking of telling him to push on the threaded rod in a different direction - too late. Before I knew it the bandsaw blade was through and the end of the threaded rod, still being held by the contractor, came down and smacked me in the left eye...but on top of my safety glasses. I rarely wore safety glasses because it was still not being enforced at that time. There was a prior incident involving tin snips, metal framing, and a small triangle of metal framing getting stuck in my forehead, while not wearing safety glasses, that got me thinking (I didn't even realize the metal was there until I reached up to wipe the sweat off my forehead and discovered it was blood). After the incident with the threaded rod it reinforced my conviction to protect my eyes at all times. I wear them so much now that sometimes I forget I'm wearing them when I don't need to.

My sunglasses are ANSI/OSHA safety glasses and I wear them all the time. If I am not worried about flying stuff, I am worried about U/V frying my eyes.

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.

Steve,
I have to agree with what you're saying though, there should be, as part of an apprentices training, a course that shows what arc flash will do and to see that first hand and of course how to avoid this happening in the first place.
I remember doing a similar thing with Eaton Controls? with HV protection, years ago and I've never forgotten what they taught us, I mean it took two days, but over my career, it was time well spent.

It's almost like when we burn a derelict house down over here, one room at a time and get the new kids in there and teach them about flash-over and fire science/behaviour, it's in a training environment, so they aren't put at any real risk of injury.

We're in a dangerous trade Trumpy , i tell a lot of noobs that one is literally working on a bomb when they work it live , they probably just think i'm a crazy old man

And truthfully, they might be right.......but at least i'm still around!

A safe '18 to all my spark chums!!

~S~

I imagine 50hz has a little different buzz than 60hz. It is more of a ring at 400 hz.

Luckily I have not encountered any severe arc faults, though I have done unsafe work situations in the past that I now would not repeat. In my apprenticeship, short circuits at a standard outlet were demonstrated (230V 16A with a few hundred amps short circuit current) that was the most I saw live.

The funny thing is that all the 6 or 7 shocks I ever got were at home, none at work.
The by far most stupid was when, at age 20 or so, I thought I was good enough to change a broken 230V outlet live. Of course it happened that I got shocked, from left hand to right hand, and tripped the 30mA GFCI (with of course more than 30mA going through my heart until the GFCI mechanics acted; just fyi: GFCIs are in the panel in Europe, not in the outlet).
As someone above wrote, the 50Hz vibration in your muscles is a feeling you never forget.

The most odd was that I tripped a 230V GFCI with my nose as a teenager. It hurt. In Germany, the ground contacts of an outlet can be touched when no plug is inserted. My parents had a burning smell in the house (which later clarified to be from outside) and asked me to see what was going on. The store room where it smelt had one never used outlet in the corner and upon my close smell test on that, my nose touched the ground pin that was unknown miswired to 230V hot.

Btw, here in Germany, nowadays you get tought that a 120/230V or above shock ALWAYS requires seeing a doctor and getting an ECG. Compare that to the old electritians handbook that tells you how to find live wires by touching!
How is that in your countries? Every domestic voltage shock sent to the doctor?


And here's a bit related wake up call that tought me for my work as a machinery control-cabinet engineer: Sometimes, if pneumatics are required on a machine, they are put in a sheet metal cabinet like the controls. In the situation at a large company I worked at, they had an electric control cabinet about the size of a room door, and a flanged-on cabinet same size with pneumatic valves and hoses in it. The area where the two cabinets met was cut through for wiring. Somehow, at night the 20 bar (300 psi) feed hose broke off from the main stopcock in the pneumatics cabinet and started flying around in the whole cabinet. Destroying the electric gear like a hammer, getting 230V on the 24V side and everything electric in the control cabinet went up in flames, fed by the air rushing in. Some people were working night shift and cut off the power, I don't remember if the cabinets door was knocked open from the hose though. That tought me to use separate cabinets and stable separators, when pneumatics are involved.

I was apprenticed to a few of those old timers Andey. They called it 'backhanding', in that they'd use the back of their hand to 'test' a wire ,knowing that the reaction of muscles contracting would pull their arm back to them.

And a ECG would be interesting , really never thought of that the entire three decades i was qualified to run one. For the most part i think burns , or entrance/exit woulds are the focus.....

~S~

I can recall being a 'noob BBQ' crew participant , blinded by smoke etc , with a training officer screaming "are you !%$#@ jokers all i get for my tax dollars?"


He definitely left an impression....

~S~

~s~
I remember from way back one of the senior guys used two fingers as a tester.

Me, I had a ‘Wiggy”; matter of fact I still have that one in a cabinet.

I don't know if it was the biggest wake up call, but it ranks right up there with me.

Back in the day a local Pizza place was enlarging a bathroom to make it accessible for the handicapped and the Panel had to be moved a couple feet to be outside the room.

The SE conductors had to be taken out, conduit extended a few feet, and longer ones pulled in.

Outside, I had the meter pulled and was loosening the lugs to get the wires out. The Neutral lug also had a solid bare copper wire in it that went to a Bonding bushing on the EMT connector below.

Right now I can't exactly picture how it happened, but there must have been a lot of tension on that bare copper because when things were loosened it somehow whipped into a live terminal and sprayed what felt like hot sand into my face. Luckily, I had closed my eyes before it hit.

I was lucky that day for sure.

Bill

I can recall a few choice disasters that occurred in front of customers, the arc blast, then the little $#@! voice in the dark ....

a rather humbling experience


~S~

OK, sitting in traffic and wandering thru my mind, this memory jump up.

Way back, doing the demo portion of a jewelry showroom & work areas, I was on the last section of wall with only two receptacles in it. ALL circuits in both panels are cut out. I stitch the Wiggy in, and the receptiacles are ‘hot’. Scratch head?? Check panels, confirm only temp lights and temp GFIs & nothing else. Check common area panel, & confirm all off. Anger sets in, I want to go home. Remove 1 receptacle, do a hot to ground short; sparks flying, copper gone, still ‘hot’. Now the sparks set the old carpet pad on fire. Did the proverbial Mexican hat dance, & ran for water.

Found the circuit about an hour later, source was a little old two circuit FPE sub panel, in the slop sink room marked ‘do not turn off’. Add additional anger!!

Does this count as a dumb move??

M-m-maybe , but who hasn't shorted a circuit to find it HotOne?

I was actually told to by the owner of a facility years ago , made it go 'boom', and out comes a gaggle of mad secretaries who lost all their computer work....~S~