Man critically injured after copper theft attempt at Dunn Avenue substation, Nashville

Early on the morning of 23 May 2017, a man forced his way through a fence surrounding a Nashville Electric Service (NES) substation in Nashville, Tennessee. Police said he cut ground wiring in an apparent attempt to steal copper, which caused an explosion and severe electrical burns. A neighbour was woken by a loud explosion at about 5am, walked to the substation and saw the injured man; an eyewitness told the broadcaster he had seen the man on top of one of the transformers before he caught fire and began screaming. Emergency services were called and the man was taken to hospital in critical but stable condition. The damage caused widespread outages from the substation, leaving more than 4,000 people in South Nashville without power. NES said security is of the utmost importance, that it has protocols in place to deter such activity as well as built-in redundancies within its system, and that it was cooperating with the police investigation. The man was not an NES employee. Reports referred to the site both as the Dunn Avenue substation and as a substation along Craighead Street.

Unauthorised entry into a substation compound; cutting of ground wiring, reportedly in an attempt to steal copper, which police said triggered an explosion. Police said the same substation had been burgled previously.

1. Substations remain attractive targets for metal theft and need robust physical security such as reinforced fencing, intrusion detection and monitored access points.
2. Sites with a history of intrusion warrant a reassessment of security measures rather than repeat repair alone.
3. System redundancy and rapid fault detection and isolation limit both the safety risk to intruders and the scale of customer outages.

fox17.com/news/local/man-critical-after-suffering-electric-shock-a...