Had a close call at work...
I'm an electrician. I was hooking up the main feeds that come from the utility transformer to the main switch for all of the buildings power. It's a part of my job that I really enjoy.
I had just finished terminating that last of 24 wires that have the diameter of a quarter into its lug on the switch when I noticed it was near quitting time. I got up off my bucket and walked thirty feet to my blueprint table and was filling out time cards for my temporary help. I was chatting with the guys when suddenly a bolt of lightning entered through the doorway and struck one of the girders holding up the roof- right where I was sitting not two minutes before. The crack of the lightning sounded like a grenade and the smoke and dust it caused made me think my switchgear exploded.
Everything was fine. No damage to the equipment.
But.. I was just sitting where that lightning bolt just hit. Had I not checked my watch and got up off that bucket I think I would have been killed. 
Hug the kids, call your mom, kiss the cook who made you dinner. It can all end in an instant. And I just made 2500 posts.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Glad you are OK, Callmecrazy..... or you might look like your avatar today. It sometimes takes "a bolt from the blue" to make us stop and realize what is most important. 
Congrats on your survival and your 2500 posts! 
I always hesitate to post anything religious in the Lounge, but I completely understand that you are counting your blessings today. Happy Easter, Callmecrazy.
So it's a perfect lightning rod. But the lightning walked in through the doorway.
And yes, I'm counting my blessings this Easter Sunday.
And Happy Easter to you, femmocrat.
I guess I won't share the time I saw ball lightening on an airplane.
Last edited Sun Mar 27, 2016, 10:30 AM - Edit history (1)
Don't be checkin' out on me before we have a few drinks together.
And I know your family is, too!
That cracked me up!
really wired after that happened. 
All kidding aside , thank goodness you are still here to tell about it. That is just amazing timing!
You're grounded
No matter what your religion is or isn't.
I experienced a similar close call. Was leaning against a utility pole (one with a transformer) in a rainstorm. (My group was on an outdoor exercise, no place nearby to get in out of the rain, so we just had to grin and bear it.) I walked about twenty feet away from that pole toward the other side of the road, and BOOM! Lightning hit the transformer. Sounded (and FELT) like a bomb! Literally knocked me off my feet, splintered the top of the utility pole I had just been leaning against, smoked the transformer. That was too close for comfort!
That was Sunday morning. Monday morning break, I was sitting at a table with several co-workers, who were mostly talking shop. Another lady co-worker comes up, sits down, and asks, "Well, did we all have an exciting weekend?". I deadpanned, "I got hit by lightning."
*Dead silence* at that table! 
There, but for fortune, go you and I...
Response to Callmecrazy (Original post)
I was an electrician. First with aircraft, then with automobiles and finally with heavy industrial machinery. It was during my aircraft electrician time that I had my closest call. It was the electrician's job to install the explosive squibbs in aerial tankers. These charges looked like shotgun shells but were several inches in diameter. Their purpose is to propel a wedge-shaped blade so that the blade severs an air-to-air refueling hose if it should get tangled around the aircraft being fueled in flight.
We had a checklist for a very strict regimen regarding the installation of these charges. And as usual, we followed that checklist to a tee. Once everyone had signed off on that checklist, I would ascend the workstand that we had to use to access the opening where the charges got installed. This had me basically IN a hole and 13 FEET off the ground. My fellow technicians were standing by in the event I needed help.
So I load the two charges into their respective barrels and that went just fine. Then I started the huge nuts on that held these explosives in place. The first one went on OK, the second one.....
All I remember was a bright orange flash and instant deafness. Had I not held that big nut in just the right fashion, I'd be doing this keyboard with just one hand. And having been deafened instantaneously, I was hollering at the top of my lungs: "I'M OK, I'M OK, I'M OK!!!" while reflexively ducking out of the hole and walking backwards. I never thought about the fact that the workstand's guard rails had been lowered so that it would fit close enough to the access hole. I stumbled backwards - right off the workstand. Thanking my lucky stars, my fellow workers were there to catch me - literally - as I plummeted!
There are plastic pellets in those charges and a whole bunch of them perforated my right arm. It looked alot more horrific than it really was. But boy did we wake up the nurses station that night! The head nurse took one look at my arm - riddled with chunks of black pellets and looking like hamburger and said: "There's NO WAY I'm gonna work with that!" So with her pouring on the peroxide, I sat there with a pair of tweezers and picked out the pellet pieces - one by one.
Like Callmecrazy here, I got to see the aftermath of that brush with death and ponder the alternative. I've had a couple other close calls and I just chalk them up to dumb luck. I like to joke about "the Reaper", but I really don't believe there's a numerical list he's workin' his way through. At 71, I keep marveling at younger folks dropping out for "natural causes". But I'm not anxious about it. My time will come when it comes.
That was her job, dammit. Glad you survived to tell the story. Man.
I hope this isn't the last. 
Some of them were even expected. But how the hell do you plan ahead for a lightning bolt to walk in through the door?
