Running electrical surveying has its risks. One type of survey we did was deep crustal measurements for the Navy because they needed to find good places for the antennas they used for talking to Polaris submarines. This involved laying out wire dipoles 1-2 miles long, connecting the ends to the ground, and pumping square waves into one dipole while listening to the signal a few miles away on another dipole. You laid the wire out by walking along with a spool rotating on a handle as the wire played out behind you. We lost a guy in Spain who got careless. He was walking across a narrow valley laying wire. But as he walked up the hill on the far side, the wire formed a catenary curve behind him until it hit a power line running down the center of the valley and fried him.
We routinely stripped wire with our teeth. One day it was raining and there was a wire break that I had to splice. I was standing in a muddy ditch when I put the end of the wire in my mouth to strip it. I ended up getting my teeth loosened. Afterwards, I measured it with a voltmeter and there were 60 volts of 60 Hz pickup from power lines on the dipole.
I also had a fun night doing a magnetotelluric survey in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Those surveys measure very low frequency changes in the earth’s natural electric and magnetic fields. 1 Hz is UHF so it takes at least twelve hours to complete a measurement. I was sitting alone in the instrument truck when a thunder storm rolled through around midnight. The Oklahoma Panhandle is really, really flat, so the truck was the highest thing for a couple of miles. I was sitting in the truck as lightening hit about every ten seconds. I was timing the flash and the crack to know how far away it was (sound traveling 1100 ft/sec). Soon the flash and crack were at exactly the same time. The truck was well grounded so I was probably in the safest place I could be — in theory. At the time, though, I had my doubts, especially when I had to duck a St. Elmo’s fireball inside the truck. The lightning flowing over the truck’s surface popped some of the paint off the metal.