But what about when I need to cut live cables and bus bar?
I suppose everyone else assumed you were joking. You are joking are you not?
I ask because I served 45 years as a Firefighter and Emergency Medical Technician. I responded to several electric shock injuries over that period I can only remember one which was not an electrocution. The circumstances varied quite a bit. The Station at which I volunteered has a response area which is quite diverse in terms of occupancy type. It ranges from single family homes to small scale industrial.
From the traffic control light installer to the television repairman the consequence of contact with an energized conductor was usually fatal. The one shock survivor I can recall was a water utility employee. She got bit hard to the point of being burned when she tried to remove a residential water meter which did not have the bonding bypass required by the US National Electric Code. Not really a surprise I suppose since the house was post World War 2 veterans housing. Her bad luck was that the house had an open utility neutral at the pole were the service drop came from. When she opened that unintended neutral conductor; which was connected to the transformer's neutral through the service drop of adjacent homes; there was 120 volts across the gap in the water service lateral's copper pipe. The water utility here does not allow the use of plastic pipe for water service laterals. There entire piping system is metallic as long as you include the reinforcing steel in the large concrete pipes.
The burn center is only 15 minutes away at that time of day and we took a couple of those corners on three wheels. Electrical burns being internal there was no field treatment that I could actually provide. I put ice packs on the burned limb but there was no point in waiting for a Paramedic staffed unit to give her morphine because it is contraindicated in unassessed internal injury. She was a deeply religious woman and was reciting psalms in-route. I am unashamed that I recited the only one I could recall for her. In spite of her intense pain she smiled.
There is a river which makes glad the city of God the dwelling place of the most high.
God is within her, she will not be moved for God will help her as surely as the morning comes.
I would share that psalm with woman in labor who were having a tough time. That is the only reason I knew it. The first line of every emergency medical protocol in my State reads "
Calm and reassure the patient." I always did the best I could. I gradually learned that it really is important enough to have top billing.
She returned to work after nearly 2 months in the burn center. Her employer was immune from any lawsuit by the workman's compensation law. The investor owned utility not so much. They took a bath on that one. For about a year afterwards the electrical utility offered a bounty on open neutral detection's. I went door to door in the evenings after work offering to check homes for a possible safety flaw at no cost to the owners. I collected enough of those bounties to take my family on a vacation to the Maine coast. What me shameless? I don't know why you would say that!
"No we aren't no kind of heroes and yet we aren't no blackguards to.
We're just working men and women most remarkable like you.
