When workmen setting steel pipe posts for a fence around Berryville School yard noticed mild electrical shocks upon touching the posts and much more severe shocks when an attempt was made to connect the longitudinal pipes between tops of the posts, a police broadcast was made that the wire fence around the school was electrified at 180 volts and was dangerous to the public. When word of the broadcast reached the offices of the telephone company concerned with electrolysis affairs, it was realized that the school yard was adjacent to the ground bed for a rectifier providing cathodic protection for nearby lead-sheathed underground toll cables. An immediate investigation was launched.
Inspection showed that workmen had inadvertently located three posts with dangerous geometry of tangency between the wet concrete and the buried electrodes. Thus the pipes set in wet concrete became in effect aerial extensions of the buried electrodes. To eliminate...
