Accidents are not always our fault. Sometimes we are left at the hands of others. In my case it was at the hands of others. Was this person not paying attention? Were they having a bad day? I don’t know, and probably won’t. All I do know is that I could have lost a friend, possibly two.
It’s been a week now; I was working with two of my friends, at one of our local (global) favorite oil company’s offices. It started out like any other day, doing the usual grind. My friends were in the grid in an office ceiling, about five feet off the ground installing uni-strut for a couple LCD projectors. I was the ground man on this day, there to assist them. Three sections of strut had already been installed, when my friend was preparing to install a fourth section, it was about 6 feet long. The next thing I know I hear a loud pop, almost like a gun shot, and see a flash. I looked at my two friends, and asked if they were ok? They seemed stunned, as was I. They both replied yes. A few seconds later I asked again, and they replied yes.
They both came down from the ladders. We gathered our thoughts, made sure they were really ok. It was the same feeling of being in a car crash. What just happened? After a couple minutes my friend who moved the strut went back into the ceiling grid to look at the damage. What he found was a blackened tile and uni-strut, and an electrical junction box without a cover and six inches of exposed wire, energized wire at 277 volts. It only takes one tenth of on amp to kill someone. This type of thing should not happen to us, we install audio and video equipment.
Needless to say, my friend who has a wife and daughter, was mad, scared, and who knows what else? He could have lost his life; my other friend could have been shocked or electrocuted too. Thanks to God, no one was injured.
Later it was determined that we had done all that we could do to prevent the accident. The fault was with an electrician who did not complete his work. We may never know who that person is. There is only a small handful of people it could have been responsible.
Later we were able to joke some, kind of stress relief, as this happened at nine in the morning and we stayed at work until 2:30 PM. I am not sure what to think of this accident, except that we were blessed that no one was injured.
