Electricity Bites

When I first started wiring I was a bit careless about working with hot wires.  For instance, one time I was working with hot wires, up on a ladder, near the ceiling in a garage used for storage.  I cut some of the hot wires and the circuit shorted through my body so that I could not let go.

My option was to step off of the ladder.  The weight of my body pulled me off of the hot wires and I fell.  It isn’t the height of the fall that gets you; it’s the sudden stop at the end that is the difficult part.  In this instance the stop at the end involved a vehicle of some sort.  In some way I landed on the bumper of the vehicle with the bumper across my back.  My back was sore for about a week.

Another time I was under a house sitting on a dirt bank.  When I pulled a piece of sheathing off a piece of BX Cable (a forerunner of the metal clad cable we use today) it felt like someone had slapped me across the back with a 2×4.  In the making of the cut I had contacted the metal sheath and the current carrying wire within it.  By being seated on ground I was completing the circuit.  Once the cut-off piece came free of the wire the current released me.

One time I was working on an outside sign in front of a place of business.  It was getting late in the day.  Somewhere there was a time clock of which I was unaware.  I got hit with the current when the photo cell on the time clock turned on the feed to the sign.  That was bad enough.  However because it was a sign, a neon sign, there was also a transformer involved.  The transformer changed the voltage from 110 volts to 15,000 volts.  Boy wasn’t that a jolt.  The reason I’m not dead to write about this is because the higher the volts the less the amps.  In this instance it was a milli-amp shock.  However it still hurt even if it was a low amp shock.

Move forward about 30 some years and I was wiring an unfinished basement.  The owners were remodeling it into living quarters.  Since there were people living in the upper floor I left the power on.  After I called in for an inspection, the sheetrockers brought in their sheetrock.  The access to the basement was so tight that to make the corner they removed a portion of an open wall, thereby dislodging a box and its wire from the stud to which it was attached.

Later the inspector called me on the phone and read me the riot act.  He had been inspecting the job and was curious about a wire hanging loose, unlanded in a box, in the middle of an unstudded wall.  So he reached down and grasped it saying to himself; “Hmm.  I wonder what this is for.”  ZAP.

He adamantly told me; “The home owner or one of his kids could have been killed!”

I told him that I had to leave the power on because people were living in there while they awaited his arrival to inspect.

He said; “I don’t care about the family – you leave the power off until after it has been inspected.”  (I don’t think he recognized his 180 degree departure from his previous concern about the family.)  What could I say?  More of: “Sorry sir.  Yes sir.  It won’t happen again sir.”

For a brief moment what I really wanted to say was:  “I have been bitten on average about once a week for 40 years and I have only died a couple of times.”  But I held my tongue.  He was already angry.

It was a shocking lesson.

Making the House Payment

In Montana and North Dakota where the winters are extremely cold, construction work generally shuts down during winter months.  You have to wait for the spring thaw.  You try to schedule your payments to allow for being out of work.  You also store up food for the winter, just in case you don’t have a regular income.  Unemployment compensation at that time was very limited  …  er … small would not be an overstatement.

One winter I was spending time at home when I got a call to do some work in a dairy.  There had been a fire in a room with an ice-cream making machine.  The ice-cream making machine used ammonia as a means of refrigeration.  Because the ammonia fumes were very strong, they kept the windows open.  The open windows allowed fresh air to drift inside the room.

The fire had melted the wire insulation just enough to stick it to the inside of the conduit.  The whole room and all the equipment needed to be rewired.  My job was to remove all the existing, fire damaged conduit and wiring.  I had to cut the conduit and wiring into pieces and toss it out one of the open windows.

I heard the General Contractor telling his man: “Load up all that stuff Adrian has been throwing out and haul it to the dump ground.”  Immediately I went to the owner of the building and asked if I could take the stuff home with me.

He said; “I don’t care.  Just get it out of here.”  I went back to the General Contractor and told him I had permission to haul it myself so not to haul it to the dump.

After work that day I loaded it all onto my pick up.  It was piled higher than the cab.  At home I unloaded it in our back yard.  On the weekend I started a bon fire.  I would throw a piece of conduit in the fire.  When it got hot enough to soften the insulation on the wire, I would take a pair of pliers and jerk the copper out of the end of the conduit.  I piled the copper in one pile and the conduit in another.

We owed a house payment on our new mobile home of $132.00

The next week I took the copper to the recycler and got $132.00 for it.  Thus we survived another winter.

(How’s that for good planning?)

I was green recycling before green recycling was cool.

Flying Conduit

One shop that I worked for used a box van truck.  The box was tall enough that we could walk in and stand upright in it.  Today we call those types of vehicles cube vans or maybe cube trucks.

Tall ladders or conduit were carried on the roof of the cube.  They needed to be strapped down so that they wouldn’t fall off.  One morning another guy and I were strapping down the ladders.  While working together on the roof of the van I was talking to him about something or other and I turned my back for a moment.  When I looked back, he had disappeared.

I looked to the left.  I looked to the right.  I looked up.  Where did he go?!  I stepped to the side of the roof and looked down.  There he was, standing upright on the ground looking up.  He said: “I fell off.”  He had fallen off of the roof, landed on his feet, and never made a sound.  He must have been very agile.

On another occasion the boss told me to; “Take the truck (meaning the cube van) and some conduit and follow me.”  I put some conduit on the roof between the ladders figuring it was safe there.  I did not notice that it was a frosty morning and the streets were somewhat icy.

I was about ½ of a block behind him when someone pulled out of an alley in front of me and turned left.  I hit the brakes.  That conduit came off the roof of the van as slick as a whistle and started doing fancy dances.  They flew up ahead of me and landed underneath the boss’ pickup as he was stopped at a stop sign.

He had watched the whole thing unfold before his eyes, while he was looking in the rear view mirror.  I sat in horror and watched as that conduit headed for his pick up.  When everything stopped moving I pulled ahead so that I was right behind him, got out, and began picking up the conduit.

He said to me; “You gotta keep this stuff tied down.”

I said; “Yes sir.  I’m sorry sir.”

I was relieved that I had been ½ of a block behind him.  Otherwise the conduit could have gone through his rear window …… and he would have had more to say.