Co-Op worker burned

Our neighboring utility had an accident involving URD the other day.

Apparently they were isolating cable so a contractor could inject the cable. For some reason he pulled the elbow from the stand-off, grabbed his probe wrench, and stuck it in the elbow.

I was told no Rubber Gloves, NO test, NO ground.

I guess it burned him pretty good, rumor has it he will probably loose his foot.

Hope he doesn't loose a limb. Underground is definitely another animal to deal with. We don't know what all the ingredients where that took place on this contact other then not checking for dead and grounding it.

The crew must have developed a bad habit of isolating at one end and grounding it from the opposite end and then run under the assumption and who knows maybe the guy that made contact was at another transformer a yard over on a different phase that just happened to be a normal open.

Maybe whoever switched it out to isolate marked a wrong address; maybe the injection company didn't have a crew where everyone was qualified to perform what needed.

I'm a dick about tagging and labeling stuff.

Nonetheless it all came down to basic check for dead and ground.