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Re: Inexperience was RE: Mad experiment or Re: PDT



Original poster: "Daniel Barrett by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <dbarrett1-at-austin.rr-dot-com>

>
> Another example of the cavalier attitude about the danger of high
> potentials is prevalent is my current profession. I work in Commercial
> Kitchen Equip. Repair. I commonly work with voltages of 240 and 480 with
> supplies of up to 200A or greater! There isn't one time that I open a
> panel of 480/150A that I don't pause for the cause, but I watch techs
> poke and prod around live circuits like it's all made of 120/10A! I
> watched one trainee check a circuit with a Fluke voltage probe (the
> little ones that glow if voltage is present) find no indication and then
> promptly grab the lines and shock the smile right off his face!! He did
> not know that if you test with the Tester, putting it in certain places
> (i.e. directly between two lines) you'll get false readings. His
> inexperience cost him a couple of burns and a bruised ego. He was lucky!
>


    One this note, a story related to me by a coworker-
A trained/cluefull/careful technician was working on a piece of HV gear and
got zapped. That was not much of a problem in and of itself. His life got
complicated because the jolt threw him into an open 440VAC panel, and a
wrench in his tool bag found two of the three legs in the panel. The
resulting explosion blew his left buttock OFF.
    The point is that the collateral damage that may occur when you get
zapped can be worse than the zap itself- if a little streamer hit from your
coil cause you to spaz out and dump your beer onto your primary...

db