On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 17:42:57 -0600, Jim Redelfs
wrote:

In article ,
Mark Lloyd wrote:

They could have just tested the line, found it dead, and touched it.
THEN you start your generator...

Not to support the other "side" but, once tested and found safe, power guys
bond-to-ground the stuff on which they're working.

Usually.
But Linemen make mistakes, too.
And the time they're most likely to make mistakes
is during the Nth day of a long term outage,
which is conveniently also the time when
people are most likely to (A) be running generators,
and (B) be getting sloppy about it.