A residential Smith Lake boat dock with a faulty lighting system nearly killed three people and injured two others with electric shocks last week.

When electrician Brian Harbison heard about the incident, he was not surprised.

“We do a lot of dock service work ... and there are docks potentially like that all over the county,” said Harbison, who owns B & V Electric in Cullman. “Get a real electrician to wire a dock.”

Over the 12 years he has worked in Cullman County, Harbison said he has seen many boat docks with improperly installed lighting systems.

“There are just wrong practices, like using the tubing of a dock as a conduit and running cables down the tubing of a walkway,” Harbison said. “And any frame member of a dock is not an approved, listed conduit. That is a code violation. You should use PVC conduit.”

An electrical conduit is a protective cover for cables.

Another bad practice Harbison has routinely seen is dock electrical systems composed of common housewire.

“It’s not made for outdoor use,” Harbison said. “It wears out from the back and forth motion of docks. It’s not made for any kind of motion.”

And how could some electricians be able to cut corners on dock work, at the cost of proper safety standards?

There is no home rule in Cullman County.

“There’s no governing board in the county as far as electricity goes,” said Kyle Baggett, vice president of engineering operations for the Cullman Electric Cooperative. “There are no requirements for licensed electricians, nothing in the county.”

Unlike the county, the city of Cullman has regulations and a building inspector to ensure the electrical system of any structure is up to code.

“We don’t have any kinds of rules in regards to building and zoning regulations,” said Cullman County Commission Chairman James Graves. “You can do anything you want out there.”

Graves said the subject has come up several times in the past, but the public was always steadfastly against it. Graves said the last time the commission tried instituting regulations was in 2000, when he was the county administrator.

“The chairman tried to push some limited zoning and the public was just all in opposition to it,” Graves said.

The Alabama Power Company, which owns Smith Lake, also has no regulations for lighting systems on boat docks.

“Our guidelines are just general guidelines on shoreline management plans,” said Michael Sznajderman, spokesman for Alabama Power. “We certainly encourage people to use a licensed and bonded professional that will build it (dock) to code, and for those who already have docks to have an electrician look at it. But ultimately, it’s up to the homeowners.”

Larry Creel, owner of the dock that electrically shocked five people Sept. 5, said the power lines for the dock had been in the ground for around 30 years.

“The first thing I did was I called my neighbors and alerted them to the fact that it happened,” Creel said. “A lot of people have boat docks down there just don’t know the danger.”

Harbison said it is important for residents to hire professional, experienced electricians not just to install lighting systems on docks, but to service older docks like Creel’s.

“The main thing is experience more than a license,” Harbison said. “It’s actually pretty easy to get an electrician’s license.”

When citizens are looking for electricians to wire a dock, they should always ask for references, Harbison said.

“If anybody’s not willing to do that, I wouldn’t let them wire anything,” he said. “And get people to give a written quote of what they do.”

Harbison noted, however, that an experienced electrician does not come cheap, which is part of the reason why many docks in the county are not wired correctly.

“The cheap way is not always the safe way out,” Harbison said.

Even when docks are wired correctly, they can still generate stray voltage, which while not harmful, can cause uncomfortable tingling sensations in the body.

“The problem is people are all using aluminum docks now,” Baggett said. “Aluminum is a great conductor. That was never an issue when people used wooden docks.”

To solve the problem, residents can purchase stray voltage blockers, which are sold by the Cullman Co-op.

“They isolate the customer’s electrical grounding from our systems ... you eliminate the return current so the same electricity is not trying to get back through the ground system,” Baggett said.

He added, however, that a stray voltage blocker would have done nothing to prevent last week’s accident.

Harbison could not agree more.

“It takes pure line voltage to knock someone out,” Harbison said. “That was not lead off. I guarantee they had 110 volts on that dock. That’s the only thing that would knock a person out like that.”

Why Creel does not know exactly why his dock became electrified, he knows it will never happen again.

“There is no more electricity down there,” Creel said. “We ripped it all out.”



‰ Patrick McCreless can be reached by e-mail at patrickm@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.