Burn It Down - Part 2

 

When I was assigned to Fort Bragg back in the 80’s my battalion was out in the field.  After one of the E6's from my new platoon finally rescued us from the transient battalion one of my first jobs was to rewire all of the shop trailers and replace any bad ballasts in the lights as they came back to base.  They were 440, had 2 50K BTU HVAC systems and a 28 volt inverter. 

Every.One.Was.Wired.DIFFERENTLY!?

So of course, they blew out all the ballasts while they were in the field because of course they connected them all to the generates the same way. The Big Green Machine is ALL about standardization, right?

The E6 that was supervising all of us noobs pulls us into a van and explains the job.  He throws the arm on the circuit box to turn off the power and opens the door.  I interrupt him to tell him the power to the box is NOT off, we were still connected to shore power and I get smacked down.  Now, the dude is something like 6’4” and a beanpole.  There are at least 5 of us standing in the aisle of the van watching as he shoves the Allen wrench into one of the hot lugs. A fireball the size of a basketball shoots out and he is thrown the length of the trailer, knocking us all down.  Thankfully he wasn’t killed. He gets up, shaking like a crack fiend and is now so white he’s translucent which is not a good look for anyone let alone a black dude. He looks at me, says “You obviously know what to do. You’re n charge” and he left.

He was knocked from the yellow door on the left of this picture all the way to the back door.

 The lugs in the shore power breaker box were wired different and connector on the cables coming from the shore power box had been cut off and were all wired differently and the trailer was then rewired to match the screwed up cable.  We had to pull the shop manual for schematics and pin out the 440 cables.  We turned off power to the shore power box and rewired it correctly. Next the trailer breaker boxes were wired correctly, and the cables reattached.  Everything was then pinned out to verify they were right and reapplied shore power. After that the ballasts were easy. They were just a standard light fixture and were color coded correctly.