Zambia World Wide

Although we are taking life easy at home, work goes on and we are now entering into the rainy season. The rainy season is the busiest time of year, as at this time we have more line faults than the rest of the year. We can and are called out all hours of the day and night during this season of the year, life is mainly work and sleep, however it does only last for 3 months. It was about this time that Paul left and a new electrician arrived from UK, his name was Jeff and unfortunately he took nothing seriously, to him life would be easy just a holiday in the sun. It wasn’t very long before he started making mistakes, he drank like a fish but had a theory, however much you drink if you drink a pint of water before going to bed, next morning you will be sober “I wish”, his theory didn’t work. For the first few weeks he would work with me, as like me before coming to Zambia he had never worked on power distribution “power lines” unfortunately he thought it would be easy, which it can be but dealing with high voltage does mean following the rules. Jeff had no time for rules or even safety, life was just fun and a bit of a laugh! During the rains the lightning has to be seen, it is awesome the fork lightning lights up the sky for miles around and is really lovely to watch, when it thunders the noise is so loud that the houses shake, it is a sight that won’t ever be forgotten.

One night we were called out to a line fault near Luanshya, the fault was on a section of line which crossed a swamp. The towers (Pylons) were 120feet tall and wide apart, the fault could be reached from one of the towers, with some difficulty. It was dark and the rain was sleeting down, the linesmen had been unable to fix the fault. It was now our turn, the fault had to be repaired or the line could not be re-energised. Jeff and I were working at the top of the tower, the rain was still sleeting down, and we could see in the distance the lightning was coming our way, time was getting short. We had to fix the fault and get down before the lightning reached the line. We had almost completed the repair when Jim (a new engineer from UK) decided to climb the tower as he wanted to see what was happening. Unfortunately we were soaked to the skin and feeling the cold, Jeff’s language by this time was really foul (he could hardly string two words together without swearing). Jim having reached the top of the tower and hearing Jeff’s language, decided to lecture Jeff about his swearing (Jim was a lay preacher before leaving the UK to come here). In the meantime I had finished fixing the fault and was ready to get down the tower. What happened next was unbelievable! The rain was still sleeting down, the lightning was getting closer and Joseph who was monitoring the radio was getting frantic messages from the control room, telling us to get down as the situation was now serious. Jeff and Jim were in the middle of an argument about religion, it took me about five minutes to get them to understand that we had to get down and if they wanted to continue to do it on the ground. Jeff went first and then it was Jim’s turn, he looked down and then froze, he couldn’t move (it turned out he had a fear of heights). Unbelievable! He had climbed the tower with the belief that once he was up then would have no problem getting down. I finally got him to move, I said that I would go first and place his feet in the right places as we went down. We finally got down, I did say to him not to put anyone in that position again. Was the night finally over “of course not”, I contacted the control room and gave them the OK to switch the line back in. They replied that their operator could not get to the Luanshya substation with the weather conditions as they were, could I go there and switch that end of the line back in which I did. Finally we made our way home, “what a night”.