While working a garage fire we had a power line in a conduit pipe going from the house to the garage, we pulled all the fuses to the house and left only one that would leave a light on in the house, so with this i confirmed with the chief about the power being off, and was told all the fuses had been pulled but one, so i went to work pulling siding off the garage near the power source with a pike pole, but needless to say all the power was not off, and the pike pole came in contact with the wire's and arched three time's!
So by this i know now not to take the word, and that this could have been more serious than it was, there were no injuries! Lesson well learned

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We have just placed on our trucks a Lock Out Box, so that when or if we are working in either Commercial or Residental we can lock out the hydro. Actually last week we had a house fire, during the primary search one of our firefighters during the search. Was told to break the window so that they could vent, it was very smokey in the building. He hit the wall and on the third time, the wall arched. What they thought was a window was actually a small fuse box for wall lights. They could see light and thought that it was the light from outside the house, but actuall was the wall lights.

Like you stated, lesson well learned....
I work around power lines all the time, and can confirm on a couple of things... Even if you see that one side is arching and you feel the other side is dead. If you do not have the training or the equipment, you have no reason to touch those lines. Even the guys that work on hydro where telling me the last big hydro outage they worked on. They are finding more people that are setting up back up power to there homes and business.
Problem is that some are not smart and do so by plugging a generator into the wall plug, which is called back feeding there service in ther home. Which does not stop at there home, but also goes back to the hydro lines.

We had a call a couple of years ago, where both mother and daughter where killed. Hit a hydro pole, lines came down across the car, as one of them got out of the car. They where killed by the voltage, then the other panic and went to help as they exited the car. They too where killed by the voltage, we deal with a lot of pole fires. Some of the firefighters want to put out the pole, there is no risk of property damage. So there is no reason to risk anyones safety.

There is special training, and is worth checking it out with dealing with hydro.... Even getting your local hydro company to come in and do a training is worth it.
We just delt with a lot of trees down on powerlines our power company had just told us that their guys could not work anymore because of hours . So with no one working electric lines we reverted to help some of the people get trees off of cars and houses . About two hours into this power started coming on in different places . Remember they had no one working at that time . If some of the people were in the wrong places this could have been very bad .
Yea see thats the thing, what they say and what they do is two different things...I know take the approach of if its power, Im not messing with it..

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