The Burning Wire

transformers and switchgear on the street?”
    “No.”
    “Yes, you have. But you’re not aware of them because our city fathers hide and disguise them. The working parts of transformers’re scary and ugly. In the city, they’re underground or in innocuous buildings or neutral-painted enclosures. You could be standing right next to a transformer taking in thirteen thousand volts and not know it. So keep an eye out for anything that says Algonquin on it. And stay away if you can.
    “So, rule one: Avoid the juice. What’s rule two? If you can’t avoid it, protect yourself against it. Wear PPE, personal protective equipment. Rubber boots and gloves and not those sissy little ones they wear on that CSI TV show. Thick, industrial, rubber work gloves. Use insulated tools or, even better, a hot stick. They’re fiberglass, like hockey sticks, with tools attached to the end. We use them for working live lines.
    “Protect yourself,” he repeated. “Remember the path-of-least-resistance rule. Human skin is a pretty poor conductor if it’s dry. If it’s wet, especially with sweat, because of the salt, resistance drops dramatically.And if you’ve got a wound or a burn, skin becomes a great conductor. Dry leather soles of your shoes are fairly good insulators. Wet leather’s like skin—especially if you’re standing on a conductive surface like damp ground or a basement floor. Puddles of water? Uh-oh.
    “So, if you have to touch something that could be live—say, opening a metal door—make sure you’re dry and wearing insulated shoes or boots. Use a hot stick or an insulated tool if you can and use only one hand—your right since it’s slightly farther from the heart—and keep your other hand in your pocket so you don’t touch anything accidentally and complete a circuit. Watch where you put your feet.
    “You’ve seen birds sitting on uninsulated high-tension wires? They don’t wear PPE. How can they roost on a piece of metal carrying a hundred thousand volts? Why don’t we have roast pigeons falling from the skies?”
    “They don’t touch the other wire.”
    “Exactly. As long as they don’t touch a return or the tower, they’re fine. They have the same charge as the wire, but there’s no current—no amps—going through them. You’ve got to be like that bird on the wire.”
    Which, to Sachs, made her sound pretty damn fragile.
    “Take off all metal before you work with juice. Jewelry especially. Pure silver is the best conductor on earth. Copper and aluminum are at the top too. Gold isn’t far behind. At the other end are the dielectrics—insulators. Glass and Teflon, then ceramic, plastics, rubber, wood. Bad conductors. Standing on something like that, even a thin piece, could mean the difference between life and death.
    “That’s rule number two, protection.” Sommers continued, “Finally, rule three: If you can’t avoid juice and can’t protect yourself against it, cut its head off. All circuits, big or small, have a way to shut them down. They all have switches, they all have breakers or fuses. You can stop the juice instantly by flipping the switch or the breaker off, or removing a fuse.”
    Sommers was on to another junk food course, pretzels. He washed down the noisy bite with more soda. “I could go on for an hour but those’re the basics. You get the message?”
    “I do. This’s really helpful, Charlie. I appreciate it.”
    His advice sounded so simple but, though Sachs had carefully listened to everything Sommers had told her, she couldn’t escape the fact that this particular weapon was still very alien to her.
    How could Luis Martin have avoided it, protected himself against it or cut the beast’s head off? The answer was, he couldn’t.
    “If you need me for anything else technical, just give me a call.” He gave her two cell phone numbers. “And, oh, hold on . . . Here.” He handed her a black plastic box with a button on the side and an LCD screen at the top. It looked like an elongated cell phone. “One of my inventions. A noncontact current detector. Most of them only register up to a thousand volts and you have to be pretty close to the wire or terminal for it to read. But this goes to ten thousand. And it’s very sensitive. It’ll sense voltage from about four or five feet away and give you the level.”
    “Thanks. That’ll be helpful.” She gave a laugh, examining the instrument. “Too bad they don’t make these to tell you if a guy on the