Aug 02 2005

Danger Cable “Buried” Below, Sorta

Published by at Aug 02, 05 | 6:43 pm under humour,renovations

Ever see those warning signs – “warning high voltage cable buried below”?

Well rented a rototiller to do our backyard, turn our bumpy lot into a new grassy paradise. well, i’m three quarters done and all of a sudden the back step jumps away from the house, i hear a loud snap at the garage and i let off the throttle of the tiller. WTF?

Turns out i hit a high voltage power cable between the house and garage. it supplies power to all of the garage. it’s a 40amp, 220 volt line which equals death if an unsuspecting weenie like me hits it with a tiller. it wrapped around the tines of the tiller pulled the cable out of the ground and pulled the back staircase away from the house. it was like a moment in one of those redneck american car shows – “now here’s an example of low-end torque, just look at this motor pull – awesome”.

just another project that makes me curse the former owner of our house – also known as idiot, jack-ass, dumb-ass and several expletives using forms of the human anatomy. he’s famous for using drywall screws for every repair, and taking the path of least resistance (the path of the lazy one) for repairs. if there’s a way to make even the simplest repair a disaster he wrote the book on it, check the encyclopedia his picture is there under “twit”.

digging is by no means an easy task, one he obviously chose to avoid. cables like this are supposed to be buried at least 18 inches below grade, the more the better. but because this project involves work, the jackass buried the cable only a few inches below the surface to avoid digging. too much work to make sure someone doesn’t lose their life by digging in the backyard, putting a few plants in the flower bed, putting in pegs for the kids’ tent, etc.

proof that numbnuts shouldn’t be doing their own electrical hookups.

lucky for me i didn’t break the jacket of the wire and ground out, else i’d have been crisp as the saturday morning bacon.

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