Fear in a Handful of Dust

“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Lands”

Truth be told, I have few fears in life, but one that I face every day is a fear of dying on the job, and not just dying on the job but dying because of the job.  Sure, there are the obvious dangers: working in and around electricity, operating high-voltage equipment (up to 345,000 volts, pushing a button that will open a circuit breaker the size of a car that shakes the foundation of the building as internal contacts open and close), operating in confined underground areas to name a few.  Then there are those dangers that may have more long-term effects: PCB contaminated oil or asbestos-lined cables for some of the physical dangers, or the more sinister and often harder to recognize mental and emotional stress that comes with the territory of watching horrors unfold before your eyes.

There is a big difference in my job between being afraid and living in fear.  The former is acceptable – good even, because being afraid, when controlled properly, will often keep you aware of your surroundings, and alert enough to keep from making any stupid mistakes.  The latter, though, is nothing but a recipe for disaster.  If you work in this job and you’re afraid, whether it’s fear of something bad happening or fear of making a mistake, you might as well pack it in, because you’re more likely to make a mistake.  All it could take is pushing the wrong button or throwing the wrong switch, or opening the wrong blade for disaster to strike.  You can’t do this job half-assed.  You’ve got to not only be confident in what you know, but be confident in what you do, and that means pushing aside your fear, controlling it somehow.

I recently had a conversation with someone who’s very near and dear to me, and she said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “But you always seem so calm and under control,” to which I replied, “Because that’s how I have to be.”  You have to not only know what to expect when you’re operating electrical equipment, but you have to think ahead to what you’re going to want to do in case something goes wrong, and even that may not be enough, because if something blows up in your face, what are you going to do then?

The job was actually very easy when I first started, because I just didn’t know any better.  I was ignorant of both my surroundings and of the inherent danger in what I was doing.  Then after a while I heard of an accident on the job.  A manhole blowing up.  Someone getting hospitalized with third-degree burns.  Then I started to pay attention to the guys in the locker room, see their scars and hear their stories.  Gradually, it starts to sink in that I’m dealing with some heavy-duty shit.  And if you’re ever seen something blow up, then I can assure you it sinks in in a hurry.

I can very easily picture the first explosion I saw.  It was downstairs in the basement of a BU Medical Center building.  The customer had a problem on their electrical gear, and so I went down with the building electrician to check it out with him, since I’d already examined our gear and found no problem.  It was his first week on the job, and he was nervous both because of being new and the fact that one of the medical buildings was currently without power.  He found out where the problem was, and so he closed a 14,000 volt switch to pick the building up.  What he didn’t bother to find out, maybe because he was nervous or afraid of what might not happen if the outage was prolonged, was where the problem was in the first place.  Turns out it was right behind him inside a dry (meaning no liquid insulation) transformer.  I can close my eyes and see the initial ball of flame explode, blocking him from my sight, then in the next instant feel the blast of heat and wind as the flame expanded outward, the noise like thunder in my ear.  Smoke and debris filled the air, and it was minutes before I could see or hear again.  But somehow the guy who threw the switch survived with not one scratch.

Point is, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and think ,”Oh shit, this building’s out and I’ve got to get the power back on,” but it’s always, always better to take a few extra minutes and think about what has happened and why.  Apologies to all those that experienced extended outages, but if the person working is good at their job, they’re not going to rush to put your power back at the cost of their life, or even worse, someone else’s.  You don’t just lose power for no reason.  The thing to remember is to find out what happened before you do anything about it, or you could end up compounding the problem.

The BU electrician got off lucky, but others haven’t.  Here’s a few examples just to give you an idea of what I’ve seen or heard from the guys at the shop.

An overhead lineman is working on connecting up some cable to a new transformer.  While he’s insulating a termination with one hand he reaches up with the other to give himself support.  He ends up grabbing on to the other end of the transformer and in doing so completes the path for electricity with both of his arms, killing himself.  In addition to this, because any death or accident on the job is now considered a crime scene, no one was allowed to lower the bucket truck to remove the worker until the police had made an investigation of the scene.  His wife showed up and was forced to look at her husband’s body slumped over the edge of the bucket truck for almost three hours until the investigation was complete and he was finally lowered to the ground.

During the Blizzard of ’05, there was an explosion at an electrical station for a biomedical research building in Cambridge, which caused some pretty widespread outage.  Travel was slow (we ended up with almost 2 feet of snow when all was said and done), but finally the crew arrived and the problem was found.  The fault inside the gear was isolated and the worker was simply going to cut the faulted section clear in order to put the customer back.  He tested the equipment de-energized, then went to his truck to get some tools.  While he was gone, something happened at another location, the result of which was the line became re-energized without anyone knowing.  The worker came back from the truck and, with power tools in hand, leaned into the gear.  He got hit with 14,000 volts which entered into his abdomen and exited through both his thumbs.  He was induced into a coma for six months and now, almost four years later, can tolerate minimal exposure to the sun.  The doctors managed to save his hands which they initially thought they were going to have to amputate.  He is still out on disability.  One of the other workers present is still in therapy, and another worker left the job altogether.

A worker was doing some maintenance on a transformer outside in the back of a mall.  He was working on the protector part of the transformer (a protector is basically a circuit breaker that operates automatically with some relays that protect and monitor the breaker.)  He was almost done and took his protective hood off to close up a tiny sliding door inside the protector.  What he didn’t know was that there was a screwdriver left inside the protector, and when he slid closed the door it bumped the screwdriver, causing it to fall, and it came in contact with the internal parts of the breaker, which exploded in his face.  A man who happened to be walking his dog behind the mall saw the worker running and beating at his head which had caught on fire.  He was good-hearted enough to tackle the worker and roll him around, effectively putting out the fire and saving his life.  The worker returned to light-duty after being out of work for over a year, and retired nine months later.

Now these aren’t examples of how fear can cause mistakes, but they are a constant reminder of what can happen on the job.

Whenever I work with someone who’s new to the job, I try and take them to the oldest station we have, built in 1903 by Thomas Alva himself.  If there was ever a place to make me believe in ghosts, this is the place.  Most of the equipment inside is retired, but some of it is still in use.  But that’s not why I take them there.  I bring them inside to give them a first-hand look at what can happen on the job, even when we are careful.  I show them the aisle of switch blades in the basement that’s nothing but pure black, everything burnt to a crisp, and tell them that water had leaked into the room and caused a fire.  The fire department, not wanting to spray any water around all that exposed conductor, simply shut the doors and let the fire burnt out on its own.  Almost forty years later it still smells of burnt wood and plastic, and just walking down the aisle feels unnatural to the skin.  Then I take them one aisle over and remove a barrier to show them a speed wrench lying on the cement floor next to a section of disconnected copper.  The wrench itself was only used once, and how do I know that?  One of the guys who still works here (we’ll call him Grant) got a call to respond to a trouble call at this station.  When he showed up he saw two guys sitting on the curb outside.  One of the guys had his head between his legs and his hands on the top of his head.  Grant went up to the two men and asked them if they were all right.  They said yeah yeah, they were fine, the guy sitting down was just dizzy.  Then the guy sitting down removed his hands from the top of his head and Grant was shocked to see a piece of the man’s skull missing.  He was looking directly at the guy’s brain.  I shit you not on this.  Turns out, they snuck inside with the intent of stealing copper and the guy put his wrench on a piece of copper energized at 25,000 volts.  In through the wrench, out the back of his head, taking a piece of his skull in the process.  How the guy was even still conscious no one knows, and no one ever found out because his friend helped him off the curb when it looked like Grant was calling the police, and the two guys walked away, refusing even the request for an ambulance.  No one at work knows what happened to these guys.

I tell them all these stories and any more I can think of for two reasons: to make sure that they know exactly what they’re dealing with, and to make sure that they never forget what can happen even when we are as careful as possible.  This is one job where you’d better make damn sure that you learn from the past, because if you don’t you do a disservice to not only those that have suffered before you, but to yourself as well.