Module 1 — My First Hard Lesson

I was barely into my 2nd year of my apprenticeship and I was on distribution crew doing make ready work in Adel, Georgia. We had a new guy show up on Monday, the GF introduced him and everyone welcomed him and introduced themselves. All of the apprentices were stocking trucks and lineman were telling war stories about their weekend. We had a couple rear of poles that we had set the week prior, so we headed out to work those out. The new guy was with me and my journeyman and he wanted to see what this new guy was about because he was a white ticket. Well come to find out this guy knew something, he climbed better than a squirrel. He let my lineman take the lead and followed suit, he seemed as if he knew what he was doing and the day came and went safely. Fast forward a week and a half later, it's Thursday mid morning and we're working right down the side of the road, John the white ticket is in a bucket transferring phases from the old pole to the new one and my lineman Donnie is on the next pole doing the same. It's 3 phase cross arm construction with 3' spacing on neutral. I'm tending both trucks making sure both lineman have all they need to work with. They'd gotten all three phases tied in and John was taking the neutral up to the in. John hated the gloves & had commented on how hard they were on his body in the heat, he had removed his gloves because "its just the neutral" was his comment a few times prior to this set up. So he's got just leathers on with the neutral on the lip of the bucket without even a line hose on it, which i knew was wrong, but who am I to say something to a JL, so here he goes booming up and he gives the controls a little more than he should of and the Bucket lunges up and he puts the road phase primary right into the back of his neck. He takes 7200 volts into the back of his neck through his upper body and right to system neutral. I felt the heat from the ground, it was the first time I'd seen or heard a contact. I look up and there is smoke everywhere and the bucket is still there but I don't see John. At that time, i see the foreman is jumping in the belly of the bucket and goes to dead man and is lowering the bucket. A lady who lived across the road comes out her house screaming the fire department is on the way. The foreman gets the bucket broke over so we can get John out the bucket to start CPR and first aid, and that's the first and hopefully only fatality I'll ever see. John was almost unrecognizable, they said his core temperature reached several hundred over a thousand degrees in milliseconds, his body was basically a human pot roast. His flesh literally pulled off his body as we tried to pull him out of the bucket. It was at this point the foreman said "its too late, that's nothing we can do for him". And that's when it hit me that a man I just spoke with minutes ago was now dead. His wife no longer had a husband, his 2 little girls no longer had a daddy, that his parents no longer had a son. It would take a few days for me to realize the impact was far more widespreadthan just his immediate family. Had a apprentice working on the same job but another crew drop out of the apprenticeship because he didn't want that to happen to him. Flash forward about 2 weeks, the preliminary investigation comes back and it was determined that accident was 100% John's fault because he wasn't a lineman, he had done cable and telephone prior to that. His wife said about 2 weeks before he hired on, her got news of a third child and he said he had to find something better where he could give his family the life they deserved. So he went to the hall and got white ticket and get told he could work 6 months and if the guys he was working with would vouch for him they'd give him his yellow ticket. If that man would've humbled himself and told the hands he wasn't at the level they had him working at, they would've helped him out but instead he chose to work way out of his skill set and he paid for it with his life. The hard lesson i learned that day was never be to proud to say i don't understand or I don't know how to do that, and if you are something you say something. I had watched this guy for 7 days and watching him work compared to my lineman wasn't even comparable. He was making wrong moves that even i knew were wrong. I seen him handling the neutral without his rubber gloves on abd not putting line hose on it. If I had only spoke my concerns to my lineman, John might still be here to see his kids grow up and start lives of their own. I still picture the body after we got him to the ground and my foreman saying there's nothing we can do for him, and the smell of burnt hair, flesh and plastic permeating my nostrils. I made a promise to God and myself that day, that no matter what if I seen unsafe work being done or if something didn't feel right i would speak up about it, to get it corrected. If it wasn't corrected, I'd load my tools up, drag up and go somewhere else. I also promised myself I'd never let pride keep me from saying I didn't know something or was unsure exactly as to how something was supposed to be done. Thanks for letting me share, I pray for this story to possibly save a life one day, it may even be your own.

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