Written and reviewed by Josh Kohanim, Esq., California Bar No. 328609 · Reviewed
In this guide
Nobody argues about whether a line was energized. They argue about how close the boom came, who called the utility, and who let the crew work under it anyway. Those three questions have documented answers, and the regulations set what the answers were supposed to be.
Contact with an overhead line, an arc flash at a panel, energized temporary wiring, a fire, or a chemical or hot-surface burn on a Los Angeles construction site each runs on the clearance and lockout rules and on who controlled the work. Electrical injuries in a finished building belong on our Los Angeles premises liability page.
The distance required from power lines
Title 8 section 2946, a California workplace safety regulation titled Provisions for Preventing Accidents Due to Proximity to Overhead Lines, states that no person, firm, or corporation, or agent of the same, shall require or permit any employee to perform any function in proximity to energized high-voltage lines without the safeguards it requires. It then sets two different tables of minimum distances, and knowing which one applies is half the argument.
The regulation's first table governs general operations by people, tools, and materials. Its second governs material storage and machinery with a boom, which is the one that matters when a crane, a concrete pump, a boom lift, or a dump bed comes near a line. The boom distances are stricter at every voltage, because a boom does not stop where a person would.
| Nominal voltage | Minimum clearance |
|---|---|
| 600 to 50,000 | 6 feet |
| Over 50,000 to 345,000 | 10 feet |
| Over 345,000 to 750,000 | 16 feet |
| Over 750,000 to 1,000,000 | 20 feet |
| Nominal voltage | Minimum clearance |
|---|---|
| 600 to 50,000 | 10 feet |
| Over 50,000 to 75,000 | 11 feet |
| Over 75,000 to 125,000 | 13 feet |
| Over 125,000 to 175,000 | 15 feet |
| Over 175,000 to 250,000 | 17 feet |
| Over 250,000 to 370,000 | 21 feet |
| Over 370,000 to 550,000 | 27 feet |
| Over 550,000 to 1,000,000 | 42 feet |
Those distances are why the first questions in a line-contact case are documentary rather than medical: whether the utility was asked to de-energize, cover, or relocate the line before the work started, whether there was a spotter, and whether the exclusion zone was marked on the ground. Every one of those has a paper answer somewhere, and none of the paper is in your employer's file cabinet alone.
Shutting off power before anyone touches it
Title 8 section 3314 is titled The Control of Hazardous Energy for the Cleaning, Repairing, Servicing, Setting-Up, and Adjusting Operations of Prime Movers, Machinery and Equipment, Including Lockout/Tagout. Machinery capable of movement must be stopped and the power source de-energized or disengaged before that work begins, and the person who locks or tags out the machine must be an authorized, qualified person.
What an electrical injury does
Two mechanisms cause the harm. Current passing through the body disrupts the heart's rhythm and cooks tissue along its path, which is why a small entry wound on a hand can accompany destroyed muscle in the forearm and a cardiac arrest at the scene. An arc flash is the second: current arcing through the air between conductors, releasing heat and a pressure wave without any contact at all.
The consequences follow from those two facts. Deep burns are worse than the skin suggests and require repeated surgery, which our Los Angeles catastrophic injury page covers. Anoxic brain injury, damage from the brain going without oxygen, follows where the heart stopped before anyone reached the worker, which our brain injury page covers. Nerve damage, chronic pain, and hearing loss follow the blast. An emergency room record that says minor burns is not a description of the case six months later.
Who is liable besides your employer
| Party | Why they are reachable | What proves it |
|---|---|---|
| The utility | Line ownership, clearance, and response to notice | Clearance requests, outage logs, field notes |
| The general contractor | Retained and exercised control over the work zone | Site safety plan, daily reports, directives |
| The electrical subcontractor | Ordinary negligence in its own scope | Temporary power drawings, permits, sign-offs |
| Equipment owner or lessor (rental company) | Machine supplied without insulation or limits | Rental agreement, service history |
| A public entity | Dangerous condition of public property | Gov. Code 835, notice records |
The general contractor's exposure is governed by the retained-control rule set out on our Los Angeles construction accident lawyer page: it must have kept control over the manner of the work, actually used that control, and made a negligent contribution to the harm. Line clearance is one of the few site functions a general contractor almost never delegates cleanly, because it is the one that requires calling an outside utility.
Evidence that has a short life
The employer has to report an electrical injury to Cal/OSHA, the state workplace safety agency, immediately, and no later than 8 hours, if it required inpatient hospitalization for other than observation or diagnostic testing, or produced an amputation, the loss of an eye, or any serious degree of permanent disfigurement, under Title 8 section 342 and the definition in section 330(h). That report is what puts an inspector on the site while the temporary panel is still wired the way it was.
Beyond the inspection, four records matter and three of them are held by companies you have never spoken to: the utility's clearance or de-energization request file, the general contractor's daily reports for the day of the contact, the temporary power drawings and permits, and the machine's own service history. Ask for all four in writing in the first week, and ask the utility to preserve any fault or outage data for the circuit.
When an electrocution case breaks down
- The line was properly de-energized and the contact was with your own employer's equipment, on a site where nobody else was involved in the work.
- Your employer requested the clearance, received it, and the crew still worked inside the zone. That is comparative fault and an exclusive remedy problem, meaning the fault sits with the employer that workers' compensation shields, at the same time.
- The voltage was below the range section 2946 covers, which moves the case onto ordinary negligence and the condition of the temporary wiring.
- A public utility district owns the line and six months have passed without a written government claim under Government Code section 911.2.
- The burn came from a chemical or a hot surface with no electrical component, in which case the analysis runs on the material, the labeling, and the supplier rather than on clearance distances.
What decides an electrical injury case
Distance and documents decide it: how far the boom, the tool, or the body was from an energized conductor, what section 2946 required at that voltage, whether a written lockout procedure existed for that machine, and which company was responsible for making the call to the utility. The medicine sets the value of the case, and those four answers decide whether there is one.
Get the burn care started, report the injury in writing, and get written preservation demands, asking each to hold its records, out to the utility, the general contractor, and the equipment owner this week. If a machine was involved, our page on crane, forklift, and heavy equipment accidents covers the records that go with it, a shock that caused a fall is covered on falls from heights and scaffolding, and how the workers' compensation insurer is repaid out of any recovery is on third-party claims and workers' compensation.
Tell us the voltage, the equipment, and who was running the site. We will send the preservation demands. No fee unless we recover.