AN ANONYMOUS Basingstoke man has shared a shocking story of how music playing from a radio narrowly saved him from being electrocuted by a live wire carrying over 10,000 volts.

The electrician, who goes by the name ‘Adam of Basingstoke’, shared his jaw-dropping story in a recently published book titled ‘Everyone’s Got A Story To Tell’ by Nick Fisher Books.

Although the date and the exact location are not shared in the story, the man said it happened at a “factory miles away from anywhere on an old disused industrial estate” in Basingstoke.

The man said the song ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ quite literally applied to his life.

Here is the excerpt from the book that tells Adam’s story:

I was once working on an empty factory unit, which I was renovating for a friend of mine who owned it. I was working on it alone and it was quite boring at times because I had nobody to talk to and the days seemed to drag. What made it worse was that the factory was miles away from anywhere on an old disused industrial estate, 95 percent of which was unoccupied. So not only was I the only person in the factory I was also the only person on the entire estate.

One day my friend, Peter, who owned it called in to see how things were going. We had a bit of a chat about what needed doing and he asked me if there was anything I needed. So I gave him a list of the things I needed and he said he’d get them. In jest, I also said that a bit of company or someone to talk to wouldn’t be a bad idea and he laughed and wandered off to the other side of the factory to look at something else that needed doing. I carried on doing what I was doing and five minutes later I heard him shout, “Here you go. This’ll help pass the time of day,” and then I heard the sound of music playing. He’d found a radio in a cupboard and plugged it in. That’s better, I thought to myself, a bit of music, that’ll relieve the boredom. Peter then reappeared and he stayed for another fifteen minutes and then he shot off.

Before he left he asked me to take down a cable that was running the full length of the factory across the top of one of the walls near the ceiling. He said he wasn’t sure if it was live or not so I tested it and it was. So I turned the electricity off at the consumer unit and got the ladders that were leaning over the electric box and moved them to the far end of the wall where the cable went up into the ceiling, and I got a pair of snips (pliers) to cut the cable. I went up the ladders but when I got to the top and saw how thick the cable was I realised that the snips I had wouldn’t be big enough to cut through it as it was a really thick cable and the snips were only small ones, the sort you’d use for snipping through the flex on a household appliance such as the lead on a kettle or a television plug. This cable was ten times as thick as the lead you get on a plug in your house, and ten times as powerful.

So I went back down the ladder and went to my van and got a bigger pair of cutters. I then went back in and back up the ladder. I pulled the cable away from the wall a bit so I could get the cutters around it and I opened the cutters up and put them on the cable to cut through it. I started to squeeze the handles to cut it and as I saw them begin to squash the cable and cut into the black rubber I immediately stopped and momentarily froze. I felt a shiver go down my spine. Not from the cable. I hadn’t got a shock off it. It was a cold shiver I felt, one of fright. Why did I shiver with fright? Well because coming from the far side of the factory I could hear the radio playing that Peter had plugged in. The electricity supply was still on and it was still running through the thick cable that I was about to cut.

I thought how on earth can the radio still be playing when I’ve turned the electricity off? I couldn’t understand why.

I still had hold of the cutters and they were still pressed on either side of the cable, squashing it. So I quickly let go of them and they dropped to the floor and when I looked closely at where I’d started to cut into the rubber I could actually see the thick copper cable inside it. I was a millimetre away from being electrocuted and if I’d have squeezed the handles of the cutters just a fraction harder that would’ve been it. Bang! And because I was there on my own and the industrial estate was deserted and there was no one for miles around who might have heard the bang, and it would have been a right bang, I’d have died. Although even if someone had heard it and come to my aid there probably wouldn’t have been a great deal they could have done anyway because the power running through a cable that size would have undoubtedly killed me outright.

When I went back to the consumer unit and looked at it, the switch was off. But what I didn’t see, because the ladders were leaning against it, was that coming from the top of the wooden electric box that the consumer unit was inside of was a conduit (a metal tube) that had cables inside it. This went up towards the ceiling and was connected to the mains unit, the big metal box type with a handle on it that you pull down which switches off the incoming supply from the street, and this box was in the ceiling hidden by the ceiling tiles. So I didn’t see it. Usually, you isolate the incoming electric supply at the consumer unit, the type you find in people’s houses, and you just flip the switch to ‘off’. But in some industrial buildings, mainly older ones like that one, they also have the metal box type and this is the one that needs to be switched off to isolate the incoming supply. I later found out that the incoming voltage was over 10,000 volts and the cable I was just about to cut was connected directly to it. So if it wasn’t for Peter finding that radio and plugging it in I would’ve been frazzled. Perhaps I should have rang the radio station and requested the song Last Night A DJ Saved My Life!

‘Everyone’s Got A Story To Tell’ is a collection of anonymous stories by “ordinary and everyday people”.

The stories include one about A&E staff seeing a man hobbling in with a cucumber up his anus and claiming he got it there after he’d slipped and fallen on it whilst cooking in the nude; among many others.

Nick Fisher, the man behind the book, said the stories are now being adapted for television.

The book is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.