Electrical Workers Playing with power lines

Teo, since you work in electronics/electrical, this is for you.

I have told this story on the PNJ. I was an eighth grader who figured I had the world figured out(a tell to the older version).......so I had processed the concept of insulating material around electricity. So to prove that power lines were safe coming into your home.....I climbed on top of a swing set and balanced myself while grabbing the electric line........well fortunately for my dumb asz it was the telephone line......but my antics got back to my eighth grade science teacher. We come into his class about two weeks after the incident, and he has this static generator device with a big metal ball on top of a cylinder which is generating static electricity.......so always challenging folks including teachers.....he called me up to the front of the class adjacent to the generator......he hands me a plastic ruler........he asks me if the material in a plastic ruler is an insulating material.....I respond....yes it is. He asks me to take that insulator and approach the metal ball with the ruler.......I got within three inches of the ball and the room lit up as an electrical arch passed into the ruler and I get tazed or zapped as if someone hit me with a bat.......the class gets a huge belly laugh.....and then he chews my asz out saying that what I did could have killed some smaller kids who had observed my antics, and that insulating materials alone do not always stop the flow of electricity.....every student that day learned an important lesson......but I learned the most.....sometimes when you think you got the world figured out......you will get zapped.

I have had a life time friendship with this teacher and although I have not contacted him in the last few years, I have kept in touch with his daughter and understand he has retired to the deep woods of Northern Wisconsin. I was blessed with teachers who cared.

I have a great deal of admiration for these guys and those that work on high power lines from a helicopter.

When I am operating my lull all terrain forklift, it has a 42 foot boom/safety cage. I use it mostly on moving trees and trimming the same. However, I have had to work near power lines and it is very very dangerous if you are not constantly weighing all the probabilities of things going bad......I have ran an excavator where I have almost been tragically careless with high power lines. The power companies have lifts which are protected from grounding, but the average Lull has no protection, nor does the average excavator.....so when you make contact.....you are toast. These guys take risks, but their training and equipment minimize the risk.....the average guy in the backyard who is careless with equipment....well that is another story.

"Only three things I have been afraid of......electricity......height.......and women........and I am married too....."

Dangerous work.....