Post here if buried power lines would have prevented a power outage for you sometime in the last 10

[COLGATE4]

97. While I was at the utility in question we usually had

2-3 cases a year where an individual was either electrocuted or severely hurt by either contacting or coming close enough to a principal line to get shocked. More often than using pruning hooks it's people using aluminum ladders, working on the roof or whatever and moving them around without looking up. You don't necessarily even have to hit it to get a lethal jolt. Even if you're not killed outright the damage done by electricity passing through your body is so graphic and usually horrible that I won't go into details. Your neighbor may have been pissed at you, but believe you, he wouldn't have been if he had seen some of the photos I've seen.

Unfortunately the law does not usually allow us to collect outage-related costs from the contractor, although depending on the type of damage which occurs, we may sometimes collect from their insurer. Contractors by and large try to do the right thing but they're often under time crunches to do or finish a job and it's in final analysis it's the guy/girl running the backhoe who gets to say "I thought I knew where it was".