Zambia World Wide

One night we were called out because a line had tripped out, I sent Joseph to one end to start checking the line and Kaila to the other end, after about two hours they came through on the radio to say they could find no fault. We closed the line back in but it tripped again and locked out. I got them on the radio and said the fault was still there, I would come out and help them look, some time later they were back on the radio to say they thought they had found the fault. By this time I was only about 10 minutes away. I told them to stay where they were and I would meet them. It is no wonder they had a problem in finding the fault, I had to see the cause to believe it. There were the charred remains of a snake hanging between the tower and conductor. I took out a permit over the radio, we climbed the tower and cleared it away, then I cancelled the permit and the line was re-energized. It had been the fault as the line was now clear.

Another little episode that comes to mind, one evening at about 22.00 a major line fault occurred which required a number of staff, the fault covered a long section of the line and we needed radio’s to cover the length of the line that was to be repaired. The film Smoky and the Bandit had just been shown at the local cinema, we decided instead of using our normal call signs we would be

Bandit 1 to Bandit 4. We had great fun, it made a change from always being serious when using the radio. However we found out later that the control centre was not pleased as they had no idea who was talking to whom on the radio. Next morning we were called into the control centre where the Control Superintendant played back the tape recording for the previous day. We all thought it was great, but for some reason he did not seem amused, no sense of humour!

Not all incidents are amusing at the time they occur but often are in retrospect. One problem we often had were Hornet Nests which they would build in the towers and substation gantries. This particular day we had found a very large nest in a gantry, adjacent to the control room. We attempted to remove it in daylight but the hornets were swarming so we had to leave it until after dark. Because of its size I arranged to have the street lighting and security lights turned off. The whole area was now in total darkness, we climbed the gantry and had just started spraying the nest when a car stopped with full headlights on. A man got out and walked to the bottom of the gantry and shone a powerful torch on the spot where we were working, all our efforts to get him to turn his lights off fell on deaf ears. Suddenly we were surrounded by a swarm of very angry hornets that were not happy at being disturbed. We came down the gantry so fast that anyone watching would have thought we had sprouted wings. The idiot who had come by was the head of security, he decided he wanted to see how the work was going, and didn’t think about the lights being off.

An incident that occurred while bush-clearing beneath the power lines was not at all funny. At the start of the dry season we employed 100 manual workers to clear the bush, this would prevent bush fires under the lines which could cause a lot of damage. One of the men was bitten on his thumb by a Black Mamba, the hospital at first thought they could save the thumb. Unfortunately gangrene set in and the thumb had to be amputated. When the general manager heard he asked me to find him a permanent job to compensate him for the loss of his thumb. I found a job for him in the store’s yard, it was not high paid but was the only work I could find for a manual worker who was unable to read and write. A permanent job in Zambia is hard to find when the employment level is about 5000 to 1, unfortunately he believed that he could not be sacked as the general manager had offered him a job for life. After he started work, items began to go missing from the stores, we watched and found he was the culprit. I warned him a number of times to stop or he would be sacked, I was wasting my breath, he still carried on stealing. I was left with no choice but to see the general manager and explain what was happening, the man was sacked, I still cannot understand how he could be so foolish, as a permanent job is something most Zambians could only dream about. I am now boring myself with all this talk of work and so am moving on.