TTEC worker electrocuted
By AZARD ALI & STACY MOORE
NEWSDAY
Wednesday, January 18 2012A TRINIDAD and Tobago Electricity Commission (TTEC) employee was electrocuted yesterday in Penal while working on overhead high-tension lines. Dead is Gary Wendell Patterson, 43, a linesman with TTEC. He was killed while standing in a bucket elevated 20 feet from the ground by a hydraulic truck along the Penal/Quinam Beach Road. Patterson is the second worker to die whilst working on TTEC poles.
The incident happened at about 11 am along Penal/Quinam Beach Road and TTEC’s health and safety personnel on the scene yesterday, immediately began conducting an investigation into the worker’s electrocution. Patterson’s death brings to four the number of linesmen who have been killed within the past nine months. Last week Samuel Ownsu, 35, of Montrose, Chaguanas, died when he fell into a trench while installing braces on a TTEC pole close to Power Gen’s compound in Port-of-Spain.
In an immediate response to Patterson’s death yesterday, TTEC stated that the commission had taken a decision to revisit its safety rules and procedures throughout the company’s operations in an effort to reinforce safety.
Yesterday, a spokesman from the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union said that safety was at risk at TTEC and the union would be addressing linesmen outside the commission’s offices on Cipero Street, San Fernando.
Referring to the death of Patterson and Ownsu, the spokesman said, “The OWTU has been complaining about safety risks to especially linesmen. Four deaths in almost a year, is too much and we will be addressing the workers tomorrow morning in San Fernando.”
Villagers along the Penal/Quinam Road where the incident occurred, said they saw a sudden burst of blue flame from the top of the pole, and the electricity in their homes went immediately out. They saw Patterson slumped into the elevated yellow bucket. His fellow linesmen who were on the ground assisting him in the installation of a new Air Break switch, looked on in horror.
TTEC’s Corporate Communications Manager Annabelle Bransnell, in a media bulletin, stated that safety measures which protect linesmen working on a live wire, were in place to protect workers at the time. “However, an immediate investigation has been launched to ascertain what occurred in this situation,” the media release stated. Patterson was from Robert Village, Tableland, and had been in the employ of TTEC for the past eight and a half years in the southern area.
When Newsday visited the scene yesterday, six of Patterson’s grief-stricken fellow linesmen who were working on the ground at the time, sat together on a log under a tree next to the pole.
Patterson, affectionately called “Boye”, was the father of Shantel Patterson, 19, and when Newsday visited the family at Worrel Road, the teen said she was writing an examination at school yesterday when she received news about her father’s death. Patterson’s mother, Phyllis, 67, said, “My son left to go to work 6 o’ clock this morning. His wife is a teacher. I got a phone call this morning that my son was burnt. I didn’t know it was serious. But then a neighbour came across and said, ‘Boye burn bad and he dead’.”
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