Sometimes it pays not to be first—especially when someone is sending 17,500 volts down the cable you're following…The Electric Crawdad Dance

By Eric Morris

For twenty years Duane McEwen worked as a diver for the Puget Power electricity company – as in laying and repairing those immense submerged electrical cables that carried a few zillion volts. Most of the time Duane worked alone because no one else was dumb enough to accompany him anywhere near one of those high-voltage cables. However, eventually the government demanded safety divers accompany him and so Duane began scouting around for some good divers with some very small brains. He found me and Steve Ruff at the dive shop. It didn’t take Duane long to peg us out as gung ho guys without a brain between us, which worked just as well as having a diver with a small brain. To make sure, at first he started making easy sport dives with us for fun, sizing us up. Then, a couple of months after everyone was relaxed with one another, he sprung his trap.“I got a little repair job beneath the 405 bridge on the east side of Mercer Island.” said Duane innocently over the phone. “Just need a dive buddy or two to keep an eye on me, make sure I don’t drown. New safety requirements, ya know. It’ll be easy.” Mercer Island sits in the middle of Lake Washington, connected to Seattle and Bellevue by bridges. Beneath the east span of the I-405 bridge ran several enormous power cables feeding electricity to the island’s homes. We met at a concrete electrical vault underneath the freeway overpass. It was where the power cables that connected Mercer Island to Bellevue terminated. A rat had somehow gotten into the vault and made a misstep as it crossed the cables, shorting them out. The resulting electrical short affected a large portion of Mercer Island. All that remained of the rat was its tail and bits of hide and charcoal goo, plastered up on the ceiling. A side effect of the electrical short was that one of the underwater cables had overheated and developed a fault in its protective rubber cover. Duane’s job was to find the damaged spot on the cable, mark it with a buoy, set a lifting hook, then retreat to the surface. The power company had a barge anchored overhead and would lift the cable to the surface, repair it, and let it sink again.

Puget Power Cable Repair Barge, 1960s–1970s.

The theory of finding a fault in an underwater power cable was simple: A diagnostic burst of 17,500 volts was fired through the cable every fifteen seconds. With power on, a diver close to the damaged spot would feel his hairs stand on end during the pulse. He could then back up a bit and during the seconds before the next pulse, the diver could quickly mark the bad cable area with a loop of line. On a subsequent pause, a line would be attached to the loop and a buoy would be sent to the surface. That is fifteen seconds to dash in, tie the marker buoy to the bad spot on the cable and send the buoy to the surface – and be at least ten feet away before you got zapped! Fifteen seconds. 17,500 volts. Think about it. At the time, Steve and I were supremely confident that we’d be fine. After all, we were both teenagers and were invincible. Plus we were being shown the ropes by Duane, who’d found and repaired dozens of power cable faults. The three of us suited up, walked down the bank into the green waters of Lake Washington. Big yellow signs warned boaters not to anchor beneath the freeway bridge so their anchors wouldn’t foul the cables. We waded into the lake and started following the silt covered cables. Things went well until we reached forty feet. I noticed that Duane had dropped back a little to let Steve and I take the lead. I figured there must be a reason that Duane fell behind us, so I quietly followed Duane’s example and dropped behind Steve as well. We advanced in a triangle, with Ruff in front. Soon we came upon a bunch of dead salmon laying on the bottom. Each salmon carcass was being devoured by dozens of hungry crayfish. Apparently when the cable faulted it electrocuted any salmon swimming nearby and provided a buffet for the local crawdads. It was a good thing that I had taken station behind Steve, for a few feet further down the cable, he blundered into the zone of transient electrical leakage. A pulse of 17,500 volts sparked onto Steve’s lip via the metal portion of his Aqua Lung regulator’s second stage. It was so loud that it sounded like the crack of a .22 caliber rifle. The jolt was enough to lock his jaws onto the mouthpiece. At the same instant, all of the nearby crawdads jumped into the water column as the electricity convulsed their tail muscles into contractions. Dozens of little crustaceans doing the Crawdad Ditty. The same electricity surged through Steve’s body via his lip and it caused his body to perform nearly the identical gyrations as the crawdads. First his legs kicked out, then his arms flapped. This unusual propulsion technique resulted in his moving nowhere, even though he badly wanted to be anywhere 17,500 volts wasn’t contorting his body. I never before thought that a human being could successfully imitate a crawfish, but Steve proved me wrong. I wanted to help him, pull him back, but I’d be shocked too if I grabbed him. I did what any responsible safety diver would do. I backed up a few feet and observed my dive buddy dance. The electrical pulse ceased. We had our fifteen second window of opportunity until the next pulse. Duane kicked forward, grabbed Steve’s tank and hauled him out of range. While Steve recovered from his electrocution, Duane marked the damaged area of the cable during the “off” cycle. Next he worked a large diameter line around the cable and tied it in a loop. During that session he started towards the work area prematurely and got an electric hit through a hole in his mitts – it felt like needles sticking into his fingers – but just then the power went off allowing him to continue. When the loop was finished, Duane deployed a buoy to alert the barge topside. The workers on the barge moved their vessel right next to the buoy, sank two spud pilings to hold the barge in place, then tied a heavy line with a giant hook on one end and dropped it over the side. We pulled the hook over to us, set the hook in the loop which Duane had tied around the power cable and tugged. The barge crew began winching up the bad cable. Mission accomplished. We swam back to the beach. As we changed out of our suits, Steve kept smacking his lips, trying to ascertain if he had any left. Duane tried to keep his lips from breaking into a big smile—but it was hopeless and soon his mouth was wide open in a big grin—one which I couldn’t help but emulate. Duane contacted Steve and I several times after that for other cable jobs. We suddenly became very hard to find.