Strike Two

This is the story of an idiotic act.

It contains a full and frank confession by the idiot concerned, some mildly technical stuff and a very rude word.

But the rude word is used in context.

So that’s all right.

The idiot is me, of course, and I am an idiot because despite years of education, experience and the receipt of some very high quality wisdom, I still managed to nearly kill myself earlier today.

The method of potential demise was electricity. Again. Alert readers may recall that I had a go a few months ago I drilled through a live cable and fried the electrics. I was saved on that occasion by a high-quality German made drill that was properly earthed.

This time was much better. This time I was just plain lucky.

We’re in the process of modifying a barn just next to one of the gites to provide for improved outdoor seating and dining. Basically, we’re removing the end wall (which is not load bearing) and opening up the interior. Then we’ll lay a concrete floor and tile it, re-point the stone walls and add some home comforts.

On one wall there was an old socket for the three-phase power system that the farm (of which this barn was a part before we bought it) used to use to power grain pumps and the like. I decided to remove it.

Now, my father was an electrical engineer. In fact, he was rarer than that: he was a power engineer, concerning himself with designing the switch gear that took electricity from the generating sets of power stations and taming it for transmission to the grid.

He gave me a few useful bits of advice for Life, and amongst them was this pearl of wisdom:

“Never, ever, trust the switch.”

Now, I’m going to have to get just a little technical here. By this, he meant that it was foolish to rely upon the switch controlling a piece of equipment – a light fitting, say – to make it safe.

Switches should normally be placed in the live side of circuit, so that when they are thrown they isolate to bit of kit they control from the mains.

But the thing is, in most cases it matters not one jot if the switch actually breaks the circuit on the neutral side: the device will still turn on and off. But in the latter case, the supply running to the light fitting or whatever will still be live. The lamp will be off, but stick your finger in the socket and you’ll still fry your eyeballs.

The only safe thing to do is to go to the fuse box and shut off the supply.

And I knew this. I’d removed an old light fitting the previous day that I was sure had been isolated when the wiring in the gite had been re-done, but I still went through the motions.

Today though, I didn’t bother flipping the mains fuse because I “knew” that the three-phase supply had all been ripped out, so I just whipped off the cover and began to unscrew the live terminal in the socket.

Which, as it happens, actually was live.

And boy did that smart.

I was using a Leatherman tool (made from the finest and superbly conductive stainless steel), so I got solidly shocked. I was lucky that the position of my arm was such that the contraction of the muscles in my upper arm pulled my hand away, but it took a few seconds for my fingers to unclench.

I was standing on a bone-dry earthen floor in rubber soles, which I think probably saved me from serious harm; the RCD (residual current device – a clever little switch that monitors the current balance between the live and neutral parts of a circuit and breaks the circuit if something untoward happens; for example, a sudden leak to earth through some witless crud who decided to stick a piece of metal into the wiring) should have tripped had I been better earthed. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have.

Either way, a slight odour of ozone and a ringing in the ears that took a couple of hours to clear were the only lasting effects.

When I traced the cabling back I found that that particular spur had been joined to the monophase supply of the house, so that when the three phase meter was removed it stayed live.

On the plus side it turns out that we have an electricity supply to the barn that we would have to have installed other wise, so that’s quite good.

Now I’m going to pass on a second bit of wisdom which would have been so useful today had I remembered it.

I came across this at the oil refinery on which I worked many years ago. During my tenure there, of the several disasters we had, the most impressive in terms of sheer mess was the splitting – after years of neglect – of a tank containing 20,000 tonnes (call it 5 million gallons) of heavy fueloil, the stuff used to power big ships and power station boilers.

The accident could have been mitigated to an extent if someone had taken the time to go and see what was going on when the level indicator in the tank started dropping unexpectedly. But there was a delay because it was thought that it was an instrument fault rather than a real reading.

After that day, in the control room on the instrument panel used by the refinery staff to control tank operations there was a yellow post-it note on which was written:

Assumption is the Mother of all Fuck-ups