Worst thing to ever happen!!

480 Scar on the side of my hand

In the shop testing some panels we had just built. One was 240 and the other 480. Finished tested the 480 and pulled the plug. Unwired the test lead and let them drape across my hand and I got a nasty surprise. It was still live. Instead of unplugging the 480 I had unplugged the 240 test lead. Have a nice pair of scars on the back of my hand where 2 of the 3 phases burned into it. Needless to say our weekly safety meeting was about making sure the test lead is unplugged before unwiring.

Put finger into a turning belt....magic

Like all electricians, we have (what we call in the UK) flying leads.

Plugs with a length of flex and open wires on the end to test things.

I had been testing a batch of 240V solenoid's in the engineers shop and left the flying lead unconnected and unplugged on the engineers bench.

A worker (who was absolutely not allowed in there) came in and decided to plug the radio in - yes you've guessed it, he plugged my flying lead in instead.

Wondering why there was no music, he leaned on the bench to tune the radio in and his forearm touched the live wire.
I have never heard such a scream (it's not supposed to be funny but the scream was something from a horror movie)
Because I laughed (I really couldn't help it) he reported me to the management.

I was suspended from work for 1 week pending an inquiry with the definite prospect of losing my job.
The management saw sense and he was reprimanded for going into a prohibited area.

This was seemingly a great injustice to him and he took out a private summons on me.

I received the official papers from court.

His case hinged on the fact that the door to the engineers shop was not locked sufficiently enough. He had leaned though the door hatch to unlock it and said he shouldn't be able to reach the lock. (he had actually jumped up on the hatch and wriggled on his stomach to reach the lock)
He also said he had difficulty in reading and could not understand all the signs warning him of danger and prohibition from this area. (he could read perfectly well - part of his job was reading recipes and getting the appropriate ingredients)
Not to mention the negligence of the electrician leaving equipment laying about that could have resulted in his death.
As he saw it, he was in no way culpable for his own actions.

I never heard anything more from the courts and now, occasionally I still go back there. It was over twenty years ago and he still will not speak to me.

Hard to pick just one. I was tasked with building a new panel for a 4 axis motion controller. The old panel was much larger and was a rats nest after years of changes, fixes and bypasses with 3 obsolete controllers. I meticulously logged all connections, wire numbers, etc. in preparation for the 5 day shutdown. I had to get this panel back up and running before the end of the shutdown because it was the control system for the reheat furnace that was necessary for the rest of the mill to operate. The shutdown came, I disconnected all the cables, removed the old panel and installed the new one. Everything was going great….until…
When I pulled the flex conduits up to the new panel and connected them, the cables were about 12” too short to reach the new terminal strips. The other end of the cables was several hundred feet away in a control room, routed through cable trays and a sub-basement…no slack to pull up into the panel and I was already on day 2 of 5…
Our plant had a “no splice” policy for control systems…and it was over 150 wires….so we had our electrical contractor pull six new 30 conductor cables into the panel…and I started connecting….
I was at work for 36 hours straight trying to get it all connected because I was the only one that could read my notes for connections….by the end I was having a lot of trouble verifying connections when I could barely see straight. The good news is, we got everything up and running in time and the new panel looks great.

sfindley said:

Hard to pick just one. I was tasked with building a new panel for a 4 axis motion controller. The old panel was much larger and was a rats nest after years of changes, fixes and bypasses with 3 obsolete controllers. I meticulously logged all connections, wire numbers, etc. in preparation for the 5 day shutdown. I had to get this panel back up and running before the end of the shutdown because it was the control system for the reheat furnace that was necessary for the rest of the mill to operate. The shutdown came, I disconnected all the cables, removed the old panel and installed the new one. Everything was going great….until…
When I pulled the flex conduits up to the new panel and connected them, the cables were about 12” too short to reach the new terminal strips. The other end of the cables was several hundred feet away in a control room, routed through cable trays and a sub-basement…no slack to pull up into the panel and I was already on day 2 of 5…
Our plant had a “no splice” policy for control systems…and it was over 150 wires….so we had our electrical contractor pull six new 30 conductor cables into the panel…and I started connecting….
I was at work for 36 hours straight trying to get it all connected because I was the only one that could read my notes for connections….by the end I was having a lot of trouble verifying connections when I could barely see straight. The good news is, we got everything up and running in time and the new panel looks great.

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Dang, I think I would have considered pulling those too short cables into a J-box with a terminal strip, and then run new wires from j-box to the panel terminal strip. That's not considered a "splice" is it? If so, your plant is full of splices, everywhere there is a terminal strip - that's a splice.

Big Bang

Maybe not the worst one but one that got me. A guy at my plant asked if I would stop by on my way home from work and help him relocate a dryer plug in his house. Should be easy, the dryer cable will be getting shorter so I wouldn't even have to run a new cable.We shut off the dryer breaker and proceeded to the basement. We were in his basement and had found the dryer cable coming from the panel. I had him tug on the cable as I went through his dark basement looking for where the cable exited the busy floor joice that all his electrical was run in. Found it I thought, as I grabbed what I believed should be the only piece of 10/3 in the house. I puled out my trusty Klines and with one snip there was a bang about 16" infront of my face that left me ducking for cover. My Klines hit me in the back of the neck and left a perfect burn imprint. To my suprise I had inadvertantly discovered that who ever hooked up his range ran a piece of 10/3 to it as well. As we all know the range should only by CEC standards be connected with 8/3 or better.So I ended up running a new cable all the way from his range to his panel. Not such a small job anymore. The worst part was his wife was cooking supper at the time and had all the elements on the stove on! Supper was late!

PLC Pie Guy said:

Not such a small job anymore. The worst part was his wife was cooking supper at the time and had all the elements on the stove on! Supper was late!

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That's one reason I don't do work for coworkers anymore. Once you've touched something, you own it. Forever.

Temper said:

That's one reason I don't do work for coworkers anymore. Once you've touched something, you own it. Forever.

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+1, and Same goes for family. I offered to swap out the engine in my step dad's car one night after a few beers (I owed him). I realized the mistake about the time I showed him a used (not refurbished) $400 engine on ebay and he asked "So, you're sure this is going to work, right?" I said "well no, if you want to be sure, then you need to buy the brand new $2,200 crate engine. But it has a reasonable chance of working." So, he hears what he wants to hear, and buys the used engine. Now I have to put it in, and when it inevitably fails down the road, it's going to be back in my lap. Even if he gets another 100K miles out of it, 10 years down the road when it breaks down, my problem. Blinker bulbs go out, my problem. speakers blow out, my problem. A/C quits working,... you get the point.

I can think of two, not done by me but by my supervisor at the time. Very smart technical guy, proving again that smart people are more likely to have the bigger stuff ups, because dumb people never get in the position to make these mistakes.

We worked at the Continuous Slab Caster at Port Kembla (for then BHP Steel). There was some consistent issues with the numbering of the machines, since the old one No.1 machine, had two strands (1 and 2). The new machines only had one strand, so were variously called No.2 machine, or Strand 3, and No.3 Machine, or strand 4. (this was 25 years ago, and they're STILL having that issue today). There was a problem with the modes on one machine - this was in the first year or two after construction. He was asked to go into the PLC, and force Strand 3 to go to Prepare for Dummy Bar insert. Instead, he went to No.3 machine, and forced it to go into that mode. Problem was they were casting at the time. Operators lost all control of the slide gates, forcing them to emergency travel the tundish cars, which also snaps off the submerged entry nozzles. All the rolls putting pressure on the slab immediately opened up, and it all instantly stopped moving. Luckily there was no fire, so they were able to remove the slab from the machine over a couple of hours and get going again, but it could have been disastrous.

On another occasion, we had to get access to a small 240v to 110v transformer. For some reason only known to the long gone engineer in question, it was mounted inside the bottom of a large low voltage feeder panel. The only way we were going to get to it was open the door, which meant isolating this feed. Supervisor in question incorrectly read the single line distribution diagram, and determined that it was a backup supply to the Water Treatment Plant, and could be safely isolated. He proceeded to pull the switch, which arced for a couple of inches when being opened. I observed at the time that "Graham, that was an awfully big arc for a switch that's no carrying any current". He thought about it for a minute, and decided it was due to "capacitance in the cables". Fair enough, we attached our tags and attacked the little tranny. Meanwhile, the other electrician had been called because the entire water treatment plant had shut down, and the casting machines were being supplied by a gravity feed head tank that was filled by the backup diesel pump. He had all sorts of people screaming at him to restore a very large plant - that was completely dead. Fun times.

Well, I'm the guy who wrecked the first Saturn car to accidentally get wrecked. Job #65. I was working on the engine/suspension/spaceframe marriage lines, and to get them to track properly, you have to run the line. Problem was that our sub (General Electric) who was contracted to do that part of the project could not get it working (it was their design, and their equipment). That's when I should have just backed off and insisted that they get their stuff working, but they had sent in three different engineers to the plant to do the startup, and the first two had got themselves thrown out (not by me, but they deserved it).

So it came down to me getting the thing running, and worse yet, the line was partially filled. No problem, I thought. I'll just run the conveyor until the jobs get back to where they were when I started. What I didn't realize was that for the part of the system where the car had no wheels on it, the screen guard was raised up by a few inches. When my first car got to that part of the system, it raised up on the carrier and rolled along with it just fine for about twenty feet of so. Then it hooked to the left and hit the side of the screen guard blowing out the pillow block on the drive (such a common occurrence with the Midwest drives at the time that at first I didn't think anything of it). I thought, "I'd better check...", and sure enough, job #65 was sitting rather ****eyed in the screen guard.

For what it's worth, the damage that *I* did to the car was minuscule. Maintenance getting it out of the screen guard is what destroyed it (I'm just a product of the public education system, but I would have jacked the car up and pulled the tires off and sent it through the system as normal).


And I am a proud member of the "Megawatt Club". It means something quite different if you look it up one the internet, but when I was an electrician in Colorado, it was awarded to any of the city utilities guys in Colorado Springs who (unintentionally) took out a megawatt (or more) of power (and lived to tell about it). You got your name on a plaque and everything!

I did that here in Tennessee, so no name on a plaque for me.

But I got to walk away from it...

More stories

Need more stories in this thread. Surely in the past ~5years members have some new ones to add

I can't think of anything that spectacular still new. I did spend a night working on a modbus to micrologix tag conversion for an OEM once. Walked over a set of bare pigtails all day/night assuming they were not energized. After the long long day/night the guy I was working with was cleaning things up grabbed the SO cable and the legs came together with a nice pop.

Worked as a Field Service Engineer installing and commissioning heavy winches for the offshore drilling industry (what they call drawworks).

The software is fairly complex and part of the 120 page pre-commissioning and tuning document requested to test that the system would stop with different amounts of available power both going up and going down.

The project had suffered delays, I was fairly new to the company (certainly for that position without any supervision apart from a week with my back-to-back) and my back-to-back on the other hand was very experienced and agreed to carry out some of the testing with the wire on as it would be safe to do so. He was basing his opinion on the fact that the software to be tested was indeed standard and used in other installations.

I got to the point to test whether the machine would stop or not and followed the procedure word for word... I did stop, have a coffee, a dig around the software and wondered why would that particular test required the change in such a weird place. Dug some more, but since there was no one around to ask, I assumed that since the code is standard, the test procedure must be standard and therefore has no errors.

I was wrong and tied together the travelling and crown block causing, all in, about 5 million worth of damage and labour.

No one got hurt, a few colleagues must have shat their pants... but that was it.

I got called into the office, the manager there put me at ease by saying that this has happened before, it will happen again, but he counts on me to avoid it happening for this very same reason again.

After a chat with the developers and another colleague, we realised that that bit of the procedure hadn't been updated with the new VFD control block and it would do just that.

Everyone supported me, I kept working on those machines for another 5 years out of about 9 I spent in that industry. During that whole time, and probably still today, hearing that machine ramping up makes my spine twitch.

Working one Saturday afternoon during a normal shutdown (PM), did them about every other month and they would take about 4 days, the equipment are treaters they would take fiberglass rolls and impregnate them with epoxy resin, each machine was about 6 stories tall, we had a natural gas incinerator that would suck the VOC's from the treaters and burn them at 1400deg f before dumping them to atmosfer, if something happen to the incinerator it would use a block and bypass and send them to the backup, these both are also used as oil heaters/boilers and would heat the process oil to 600 deg f

So on the one Saturday all the stars aligned... one treater was running and the main incinerator when into fault, the block and bypass switched the process variable on the back up was satisfied so it was in standby, then it need to heat and started to purge... the only issue was it was purging with the VOC's from the treater that was running, so once the 5 min purge cycle was over the pilot lit...... that was the last production run for about 3 month and I worked 14-16 hrs a day for 4 months

Glad to say no one got hurt... but we did make the evening news and they heard the explosion for over 3 miles

I still to this day find it amazon how much pressure a boiler can take, one of the fans landed in the parking lot about 300 feet away and it weighs about 150lbs but there was still no damage to the boiler

Before the explosion we ran the plant and never had a issue for 10ish years and never know they were not interlock to prevent that from happening

I downloaded the wrong program to a site 3 hours away.
I ended up driving down there on my own dime.

Working on bridge crane controls at Boeing when they were building the facility to build 777s. I was testing the crane travel operations at full speed (300ft/min) and approached a new test fixture that had been built to test the wings by breaking them off (only on the first one of course, cool video on Youtube*). As I was scooting along so proud of my success in troubleshooting the PLC and VFDs to make it all work, it occurred to me that I had never driven over that fixture yet. But confident in some other Engineer having thought through the height issues, I kept going at full speed and hit the fixture with a gigantic BOOM! The bottom 1/2" of my carrier (the thing that drives the crane) collided with the topmost beam of the fixture; Oops... Bent the fixture, the carrier and the crane rails. Probably cost the GC a few hundred thousand for that. I was not blamed, because it was a reasonable assumption that they (the Civil Engineer involved) should have known the maximum height they could build to, because the cranes were NECESSARY to load the plane into the fixture. So they were going to find out that mistake sooner or later. I just did it in a spectacular fashion.


* You can see a good shot of the test fixture at about time mark 1:47. I am in the crowd during that event.