Professional Electrician FAIL!

[NightTrain]

Just got back from a quick job at a major microwave & cellular hub. I know Gunny will get a kick out of this :



This cable was feeding equipment servicing a large portion of this area... 911 traffic, internet, cell phones, etc. I ran another cable parallel to this prior to even touching this one, and I'm glad I did! As soon as I unbolted this lug, the cable literally pulled right out of the lug - the only thing holding it on was the heatshrink. The whole site would have died, and microwaves sometimes don't come right back up after getting dumped.

Somehow, the idiot that ran this cable in the picture decided that using a #1 lug on #4 cable would be okay. Noticing that it didn't even compress the copper whatsoever, he used heatshrink to hold it together. The smallest bump or even an earthquake could have easily taken the site down, creating a comm blackout which is No Bueno due to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for the 'Unplanned Outage'.

Not only was the lug not even close to being the right size, the cable wasn't stripped to insert fully into the lug, and then it was crimped twice instead of the indicated 3 times (as per the number of stripes on the lug).

This guy failed on every level and I'm looking forward to finding out whodunnit.