The foreman had a habit of stopping by each day around 9:30am.
We were changing over a secondary pole, offset a few feet. Simple job but the wire (#2 solid) was bare as a baby’s butt. As linemen, we took pride in being able to complete our work without creating an outage or burning anything down.
My partner had an idea; we can swing it over with the blocks, without holding it off. Uh… not a good idea, especially with the condition of the insulation…and the time factor I thought. He thought it could be done, I relented. “But you know that if it goes down, we better have it back up before he gets here.” There wasn’t a centimeter of slack in the wire, it was banjo. Cut!
And just like that it was on the ground, after bouncing and dancing as it popped against the other phase in the section.
It happened so quickly, we just looked at one another in stunned disbelief, unbelted and rushed down to the ground.
With our tools jangling and hooks clanking, we hurried to check the condition of the cable. I wasn’t sure if we had anything to replace the damaged section and checked to see how much time we had. Luckily, aside from a few burn marks, there was no real damage. The lineman climbed back into position and working along with our ground man, we pulled the wire up to the new pole. No fireworks. We were in the process of moving onto the next phase when the foreman came driving up to the location.
Golden!
Terry Bellew - Lineman