On Sun, 04 Jun 2006 19:19:52 +0100, David Hansen
wrote:

On Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:50:22 +0100 someone who may be Derek ^
wrote this:-

One day in the mid '60s a mobile microwave link was being set up on
top of a remote hill. The gang, as always, went out in plenty of time
and having had no difficulty in proving the link took the mast back
down and went to the pub in the van. After lunch they went back to the
site and found a very heavy mist had come down, anyway they parked the
vehicle and the apprentice amongst them elevated the mast by standing
alongside the van and operating a lever that controlled the hydraulic
mast. The mast went up and came into contact with a High Voltage
overhead line hidden in the mist. The apprentice was killed instantly.

The van had been parked in a slightly different spot than before their
lunch.

How slightly different was slightly different? A few metres?

Who knows? In the fog they could even have turned into the wrong
field.

Did they not spot the line before going to the pub?

Maybe not, or they forgot about it. Or see above.


Did they not hear the electricity leaking across the insulators in
the mist?

May not have been that high KV.

This tends to be rather noisy, especially in remote areas
with few other noises?

Except an OB vehicle with its engine running not to mention a
generator.


Transmission lines go over some ridges and along others, they tend
to go round hills.

Well then. Hill? Ridge?

They sure learnt their geography lesson the hard way.

My original post contains a clue as to why their perception of risk
might not have been as sharp as one might have expected.

After leaving the Corporation I ran a private TV Studio with it's own
OB vehicle. After a short while I made it a rule never to rig in the
morning and then go to a pub for lunch, for a recording in the
afternoon, which would have been appropriate for the geographical area
we covered. IME something always went wrong, not nec. related to the
pub lunch, could be a bad videotape or a power cut, but whatever
something always seemed to go wrong.

Could be I'd been sensitised to it.

However by way of satisfying myself I made a posting on
uk.tech.broadcast to see if anybody could recall the incident. I left
the BBC in 1972 after 3 years with them and the incident was historic
even then, though most older engineers could recall the persons
involved on first name terms.

It turns out nobody so far has any recollection of this incident, but
surprisingly similar (some actually practically identical) accidents
with radio masts have continued to happen with depressing frequency,
including one on the railway.

Others involved guying the mast to the Land-Rover, then driving away
in it. Or driving up the M6 with the mast extended and bringing down
the power lines across the Motorway on a Bank Holiday Saturday. :-))

This link will take you to the (live) thread in Google Groups.

http://snipurl.com/rdrj

DG