It was scary things like that that really made you mindful of safety. A moment’s lapse or shortcut could get you killed. Being young and somewhat stupid, you didn’t think that much about it at the time.
I was starting up a new power plant at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base hospital. An electrician was working at the other end of the boiler building on an open motor control center panel and shorted his fishtape across a 480 volt bus to ground. FLASH!! The whole place lit up with an electric blue light and his fishtape vaporized like a burned-out light bulb filament. I figured I’d find a burning corpse, but somehow he survived without any injury. I still can see the flash and smell the ozone almost 50 years later.
I was working on something inside a box and barely touched 440 but nothing blew off and I didn’t die, the guys said that I probably only got 220 of it.
It was interesting going on the floors of stored materials where you were supposed to have a partner outside keeping track of you because the floors had a nitrogen blanket atmosphere.
Speaking of high voltage, BPA is putting in a new transformer substation near my home. The project has been on again, off again due to supply chain problems, particularly for the big components. Now the parts have arrived and being put in place with cranes. The whole affair looks otherworldly — nothing like traditional substations. The big towers and insulators keeping the three phases separate (I guess) look straight out of Tesla’s lab. And everything is sort of a silvery grey like you’d imagine a UFO to be. I’d take pictures but they have security cameras all over and would think I was a “terrist” or something
In this article I wonder if the older guy has dementia. Not trying to excuse him by any means but the lapses sure sound like it, especially if this kind of thing was not characteristic of him in earlier years.