re: What's the closest you've come to dying?

Between semesters in college I got a job building the Schwegmann's cold storage warehouse on Airline near the New Orleans Airport.

We had the roof and sides on the building and were readying the doors when a huge thunderstorm happened. It flooded the building with about 2 feet of water. We had a deadline to meet and draining the building was S L O W! The site engineers met and decided that the best way to drain the building was to drill through the slab since it was raised a few feet off the ground.

They set me up with a Hiltidrill, and luckily, some rubber gloves and boots and instructed me to start drilling holes in the slab.

I had probably drilled about a dozen holes when all of a sudden I heard a large bang and all the lights went out in the building. My foreman came over and pinched me and I asked him why he did that.

He told me that he was just checking to see if I were still alive since I had just drilled into a 220 line. Gloves and boots saved me, I guess.

CSB