I'm a retired electric utility lineman. From the pictures I would say that the two guys jerked the terminators from the bottom of the switches and didn't realize that this was a riser pole, from the sub-station step down transformer and fed up the pole to a distribution overhead line. When they jerked out the terminators after removing the stand-off brackets for what appears to be PVC conduit, resulting in a tremendous phase to ground and/or phase to phase fault that I'm sure really lit up the sky, not to mention them. I seriously doubt that the bolt cutters were used on the wire. That was the plan no doubt but the only thing they used them for was to cut the bolts on the stand-off bracket. They probably never knew what hit them. Edit: I just looked at the pictures on Snopes and they indeed did cut the wire in the terminator. They had to have had some really good insulating blankets to enable them to make that cut with that voltage. They were lucky to have got as far as they did! Our local rural electric co-op won't even let their lineman work that voltage hot even with 20K rated rubber gloves, booties and sleeves. Hot sticks only or dead and grounded.
Last edited by Sportdog; 01/20/10.
