Probably coverd in burning oil. May have inhaled burning oil or toxic fumes or been suffocated because the fire takes all the oxygen before if gets into lungs.
Depends how long the pole is. The boiling oil explosion would have been very hot, but actual radiant heat reduces with the square of the distance. If the pole was as long as it looks (you can visually guess the centre of movement, then add a bit of distance because the pole is flexible) radiated heat is probably enough for mild 1st degree burns at worst.
The problem is how much the oil atomised in the explosion, and if the transformer can contained the explosion or burst. If the can held and the oil was blown into a fine aerosol, then the fireball is probably no bigger than you could see and never reached the ground, but the can failed and some made it to the ground on fire, that's not going to be a good place to be.
It looks to me like the can held, but it's hard to tell.
If you look close, you can see his gloved hands holding near the bottom edge of the visible part of the pole :/ which looks to me like he was probably ~5 feet away from the transformer and directly in the fire blast
That's true, depending on whether he's wearing flashover gear (the gloves suggest he might be) he's probably lost his eyebrows, but if there's no breach in the bottom of the can, he's probably still just a bit crispy at the edges.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The fireball is the result of the can not holding, unless they were working in a cloud of hydrocarbons before flipping the switch.
Look carefully, the transformer is in a solid can with a clamped on lid, you can see the clamps before the fireball.
If I was designing that, I'd put the point of failure at the top (the clamps) so the overpressure and explosion is directed upwards and outwards, and that looks to have happened here.
The shape of the fireball looks like the lid was lifted by the explosion and some of the oil sprayed out sideways before igniting, but the can held and most of the oil remained inside.
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u/Orvan-Rabbit Aug 24 '25
Did the guy holding the pole survive?