We were using preform wraps as a grip to catch 1 1/4” hardline at an angle and swap in a bundle block. It felt simple enough. Felt routine. Something we all knew how to do. We had 1590 triple bundle hanging. Weight and momentum waiting to punish any mistake. I remember the air feeling thick. Tension in the wire and tension in my gut that I ignored. The hardline puller dumped into us. All that memory came alive at once. The preform spun clean off. The bundle dropped. It was maybe an inch from the dirt. Maybe two. Close enough that if gravity decided it wanted flesh instead of soil we were going to give it plenty. Then in a way I still do not understand the preform spun back on. It caught. Not gentle. Violent. Fast. It ripped the arm almost off the SWS7 lattice tower. My best friends were in the crane basket beneath all of it. I did not think. I just dove under my foreman’s rig because I thought I was about to watch people I loved get folded into pieces. I thought I would be picking up body parts. I thought that would be on me forever. I had never felt that kind of fear. Not the kind that comes later when you think about it. The kind that hits in real time. The kind that tastes like metal in your mouth. The noise stopped. Nothing fell. Everyone was still alive. We stood there quiet. No bravado. No tough guy jokes. We knew how close we came to being done. It was almost nothing. A half second. A half turn. A half inch. I learned that day that routine kills. Comfort kills. Thinking you have done something enough times to let your brain wander kills. I learned that equipment does not care if you have a family. Wire does not care if you believe in God. The job does not care if it takes you. It only waits for you to stop respecting it. I have never forgotten that feeling. I do not want to feel it again. I do not want anyone on my crew to feel it either.

The story is posted in THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE MIND Classroom. https://www.skool.com/lineman-bullshit/classroom/182302e9?md=61dc0fc3a2db4154b5d1d16ce7419b39

It was approximately 15 years ago and I had been in the apprenticeship for a while and thought I was catching on quick and becoming quite the line hand. A storm rolled through that was big enough for the boss to make an “all call” and I got paired up with an older troubleman that was a couple years away from retirement. As the evening progressed we completed many “cut and run” or “make safe” outage tickets and received a ticket for a “tree on wire” outage. We arrived on scene and located the tree pinning the wire down to the ground. The troubleman must have seen the disappointed look on my face when he told me we were going to call for a tree crew. I mentioned I would like to turn at least one persons power back on before the storm was over so he gave in and said that we would take care of the tree ourselves instead of calling for a tree crew. He allowed me to help carry some of the equipment into the right of way then made me stand very far back out of harms away. He proceeded to very slowly and carefully cut away all the branches and the part of the trunk that was overhanging the line. Finally after cutting for what seemed like a better part of an hour he made one final cut which released the wires that were pinned down causing a piece of the tree that was probably 6 or 8 feet long to launch into the air. I stood wide eyed and in disbelief at the raw power of lines under tension. Thankfully he knew that I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was and kept me out of harms way or my story would have definitely turned out far worse. We became good friends in the years to come and I learned a lot from him before he retired.

I have read several of these posts on here about everyone seeing someone get burnt or witnessing a fatality at work. Seeing it is something that we all may have to deal with one day and it’s very unfortunate that after all the training we go through that it still happens on a daily basis. Unfortunately I am someone that has gone through all that same training as you all but yet I had a flash last year that burnt 12% of my body during hurricane Hellene. Luckily it was not a contact and just a severe flash. The entire right side of my chest and back along with my right arm had second degree burns. I was wearing my rudder gloves and had box grounds installed but someone had pulled our master grounds without confining we were down and in the clear and heated the line up. How the box ground didn’t kick it back out is still a mystery to me. Fortunately I had an awesome crew and one of the JL’s jumped on the truck and boomed me down and got me out of the bucket by that time I could walk. I had lifelighted to the burn unit in Augusta Georgia and woke up in the hospital bed with my wife already there and covered in bandages. How my face didn’t have any burns on it was just luck I suppose. I have sense returned back to work and pay a lot more attention to everyone and everything around me I guess it was a lesson learned the hard way. I will never wish that upon anyone and pray that everyone I tell this story to takes away from it that it is a real danger in our trade. Everyone always says to check all your boxes but you can’t control other people actions so always be your brothers keeper.

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.