I have been tased
both recreationally and as a result of making bad decisions. This is an activity to avoid if possible.
I have also been shocked under several circumstances- the earliest one, repairing the socket end of an extension cord without the presence of mind to have unplugged the plug end first. I was seven. I figured it out pretty quickly.
When I was taking my apprenticeship at Inland one of the things that required constant maintenance were the rail shoes. On each pusher car or larry car or hopper there were two rails that delivered DC power to the equipment. The current draw was merely immense.
The rails were on big steel braces and were insulated from the steel with thick fiber pads. The equipment, which moved up and down on heavy rails of their own, received power from the hot rails by large insulating wooden arms with copper shoes on the end, that were held in place by gravity. The shoes had cables as thick as a man’s wrist, and they went into the bowels of the machine to drive the equipment. The insulating beams were pine, about six inches square and six or eight feet long.
Most of the time this stuff had to be worked hot. You could not shut down to work on anything short of a disaster, so we just had guys who were good at hotwork. To replace the hot shoes we had to have two millwrights and two electricians, and on one day Tiny and I were the millwrights, he the master and I the apprentice, and Charlie and Randy the electricians, Charlie the master and Randy the apprentice.
Charlie had disconnected the power at the copper track shoes and Tiny and I were going to yank them off (They wore through pretty rapidly) and replace the shoes and one of the wooden beams, when Randy walked over and casually leaned on the still hot rail.
We screamed in unison but it was already to late to stop him- Tiny grabbed up a piece of 6×6 in his giant hands and threw it like a javelin at Randy, hitting him ion the chest and knocking him free of the rail. He lie on the ground a bit, smoke coming from his damp clothes and his drawers freshly loaded. He did get up. It hosed his motor functions for a lot of the rest of the day, but he survived.
I saw a powerful lot of people almost die at the mill, and I did see several people die. it is nice to have a memory of someone who survived.
18 comments Og | Uncategorized
Indeed. live electricity can and will kill or maim. And if you survive, it will mess with your motor functions for a while….or permanently sometimes.
I’ll never forget that conversation in the car a few years ago…”Stewardess?, I speak taze”
The most interesting man in the world speaks tase. In dog.
A woman could have done that job for 23% less money.
Lol. The sarcasm is strong in this one mmm-mmm
I’ve taken 250 vDC excitation voltage off generators (Channelok pliers flew fifty feet), 480 vAC off live motor feeders, 10 kV AC off a transformer under test and 35 kvDC from a cable under test.
Ain’t none of it fun.
MC
Hell, a woman probably would have issue picking up the wood part.
I think if I did that and a woman was on the team I would have to have a sick day.
I have known a few women that could do that kind of work or had the intuition that mechanical things need, but very few.
Not enough I would trust myself to a strange one.
It is good to recall close calls everyone walked away from.
Back around ’83 or so, while stationed in Tx, we had a “Tech-rep” and one of our aviation Marine Corporals working on a coupler for one of the larger bits of avionics we used. They were wrapping up the job, when the Corp reached above and across said energized equipment in order to get a screw driver….220 + volts of bottled lightening reached up and grabbed him….tossed this 200lb (greek god looking Marine Poster Child) off his feet about 4-5 feet down the space between the test benches. He was okay….but looked about the same olive drab color as his fatigues right after it happened.
What Paul says it true…it is good to recall close calls everyone walked away from.
Don’t worry about the larger ones as much, because they often times will send you flying, thus breaking contact. It’s the damn “60 cycle boogie”, where you are unable to break free, that tends to kill.
I damn near killed a man once for using boltcutters to remove my lockout from a disconnect.
When I explained to him why that was an emphatically bad idea, he damn near died anyway.
And that’s why I don’t fool around with live wiring. I’ve felt 120VAC, and that’s not-fun enough for me…
Recreational tasing…..now there’s a pastime that I never even thought of, let alone tried!
Once, while working in Chicago Heights at a tier 1 automotive parts manufacturer, I just walked past a large electrical cabinet where an electrician was working on something. At the bottom of the enclosure was a large bank of filtering capacitors, each about the size of an Australian Foster’s beer can. I was about 10 feet past the enclosure when the whole world behind me turned bright white with a resounding bang! The half-watt electrician had dropped a large screwdriver causing a cascade failure of the capacitors. Aside from having to change his underwear the lucky bastard had not a scratch or burn on him. Pieces of capacitor were found 100 feet away.
Another time I was working on a spiral binding machine in a printing plant that, for some mysterious reason, had two separate 440 feeds into it. I locked out the one feed I knew of, tested for voltage, found none at the main disconnect, and reached in. I got knocked back about 20 feet onto my butt. Naturally the first words to come out of my mouth had to do with moms fornicating. One of the little Italian women at work in the bindery waddled over to me and, in her thick Italian accent, said “Youa no usea bada words arounda us!” I was shaking for about one day. It turned out that the spiral binding machine was essentially two machines, a left half and a right half, sharing mechanical components between them, each half with their own feeds that co-mingled the individual feed circuits between components in the two separate enclosures! Stupid…
Back in the late 1960’s, I was a checkout technician, working on large relay control systems, some having 100 relays or more, most of the circuitry being 120VAC. My boss at the time more-or-less joked that if I didn’t get bit at least once/day, I probably wasn’t working hard enough. It was actually the truth, but I’m no longer quite as blase about it.
The worst shock I’ve ever gotten was from the 300 VDC B+ in an old Hallicrafters receiver. That HURT!
Been lucky (and careful!) to never get onto 480 VAC, even though I have such a service in my barn & shop.
And these, gentlemen, are the reasons I so loved working in a small shipyard where most of the dangerous machines only removed finger fragments at a time and lethal incidents came from the sky 95% of the time. One learned early on to fear and avoid shadows moving over him.
Gerry N.
Guy is right. I’ve taken hits from serious voltage a (very few, thankfully) times. It just hurts & tosses youaway, if you’re lucky. Household voltage @ 60 Hz is the deadly stuff–too close to the heart’s beat frequency. I’ve heard it kills more people than HV does.
Besides (get ready for old worn out truism) “It ain’t voltage that kills you, it’s current.”
When you open your eyes and your buddy is standing there saying “you all right?”.
You mentally do a digit and dangly things count.
Then you answer “unnnh, yeah”.
The worst part of it is that you know what you did and knew it was not quite the correct thing to do.
I was working as a welder in the mid 70’s at a factory. I’m not sure what he was doing but the shift foreman was in the plant power panel and crossed something with a work mate screw driver. There was a loud boom, a really big arc and the entire plant went dark. We were shut down for about an hour and the shift foreman saw spots for a week.
Never did here what he thought he was doing.
My worse bite occurred eorking on my cruising boat. I had just changed the batteries in the #2 house bank, 2 gp31 @ 2000 cca total. I considered the job done, but when I applied a starting load to test it, the engine barely turned over. I started shaking each wire in the cable array. Found the loose one. Had put my wedding ring back on when first finishing up, and the ring closed a circuit across the bank as I swung the wrench over to tighten the terminal. 2000 amps through the ring, on my finger. I smelled the burnt flesh and THEN felt the pain, but I had a cooler full of ice water next to me, and plunged my hand into it. The doc said it saved the finger. There’s still a scar 14 years later…
Riverdog….and fiancées and wives wonder(ed) why we never wore our rings (wedding and otherwise) or any other necklaces at work. Explaining to them that one would hope they would rather have a live boyfriend/hubby at the end of the day, vice keeping our rings on cause we were married.
Most seemed to grasp what they were told…there were a few who had issues…the smart Squids/Marines dumped them in short order.