# an old accident, tree climber and power line



## shootingarts (Nov 11, 2013)

A few things to know before reading this. The climber was very close family to me. He also had demonstrated a genius level IQ in multiple testing over the years with room to spare, over 99 percentile in national standardized testing. Proven truth, his IQ was higher than that of 99% of us, lack of brains wasn't the issue.

Red had served four years in the military, volunteered after being number 11 in the last draft lottery to give some idea of the date involved. You volunteered, you chose your field but you had to enlist for longer than if you were drafted. Get drafted and it was shorter duration but if you didn't find yourself in 'nam it might be somewhere almost as bad. Also draftees got the jobs nobody else wanted, the bottom of the barrel.

Like many fresh out the military he wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. He had an opportunity to go to work with a very good friend for awhile, working for a powerline subcontractor. They did a lot of electrical work, also trimmed trees around the power lines.

Red had only been climbing a year or two, not totally green or an old hand, when he and the friend had to take down a line of huge pecans on some land the friend was going to put a business on. The primary wires going to a shopping center were very near some of them. The particular tree had been trimmed back but there was a limb the friend felt was an unnecessary risk, twenty-four hours or so and they could have free use of a bucket truck.

Where the limb was to be cut was very close to ten feet from the powerline, considered safe work distance around high voltage on the projects I worked. I spent hours staring at it later and had spent a lot of time climbing and hanging insulation and sheet metal in petro-chem plants where everything was known distances myself, I was pretty good at judging distances.

The friend left the site for a few minutes leaving Red to watch the equipment. Sometime during that few minutes Red decided to go ahead and take the limb down and keep the job moving. He was sitting in the tree dead when his friend returned.

What happened? The obvious things, young and willing to take risks to not lose eight or ten hours work time. "Just one limb to cut, only take a minute." He was alone, never a good idea climbing. When I was staring at the site for hours I went the short distance down the service entrance to the shopping center and found another nasty twist. The power lines were 80,000 volts instead of the usual 40,000 or even 20,000. Nobody will ever know for sure but I suspect that was the thing that was the final twist taking away his margin of error. Even imagining the saw totally getting away from him when he tried to start it and considering maximum extension of his arm and body and the length of the saw it still seems impossible for the tip of the bar to have been closer than four or five feet from the power line.

Just a few days later I helped finish the job, using a bucket truck and winch truck. Hell of a price to pay for saving maybe twenty man hours of work time max.

I have a huge oak limb hanging over one edge of the house I'm in that is damaged near the trunk. It also stretches over the service feed for ten or fifteen feet, 220V, 200A. I could take it down using rope, a metal shaft pole saw, and a chainsaw. Odds are thin that I would have any problems . . . Second thoughts, the limb can fall on the house or we can get someone out here with a bucket truck and nonconductive boom.

Don't get sucked into the percentages game. There might be five percent risk but for each time the result will be 100% one way or another. Too, how many times can we take a five percent, even one or two percent risk, before the odds start working against us?

Written in memory of "Red" on this special day.

Hu


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## MasterBlaster (Nov 11, 2013)

Rest in Peace, Red.


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