I could fill the Darwin Award record books with some of the true idiots I run into at work. From using kitchen utensils for stealing power, to climbing poles with a ladder to hook themselves back up. Battery cables arent just for jumping off a dead car battery......
I once was called out for a wildfire behind a local plant. When I arrived the fire department had the fire put out and firemen and sheriff deputies were trying to find out what caused the flames. They called me out because it was around one of my companies poles. I found the cause....
Apparently, some individual had stolen a sawz-all from a construction site next door and thought it would be badass to cut into a piece of pvc conduit on the pole. That conduit had 3 runs of 7200volt primary cable feeding the plant. The perp cut into one of the primary cables, caused an arc and the fire. I found his hand print burned into the pvc. He had a friend there as well. That one had been standing on the other side of the pole with his right hand on the pvc. There were left and right hand prints on the pole at different heights and positions. How either survived we will never know......but the finger prints on the pvc were visible.
