ROFL!!! A bunch of years ago now, as a Technical Support Engineer at the phone company, I was dealing with a major international company that had built a power co-generation plant and put the switching station right on top of one of my telephone cables.waffenmacht wrote:"How can you trust a man that wears a belt and suspenders? You can't even trust his pants."
The possibility of a power event causing a "Ground Potential Rise" (GPR) and injuring people is admittedly low, but the possibility exists, and that possibility is increased by proximity with places where GPRs are expected to occur.
We approached the company before the station was complete and asked that they reconsider the location of the station due to the telephone cable being directly under it, which was a violation of the phone company's right of way to begin with.
They refused and thus began a series of talks between our experst and their experts, and I was one of those experts.
During one of the last meeings I was able to get their expert to agree with me that he could not reasonable or rationally predict what would happen in the event of a GPR and that thousands of volts of electricity could be expressed on the telephone cable and that people would likely be killed if that happened.
At that point our attorney declared victory and pretty much told them to move the station, which was now nearing completion, or pay us to move the cable, which would cost upwards of a million dollars plus right of way fees and property acquisition. Their VP objected to this, stating that such an event was rare and all this litigation and expense was really kind of overdoing things, "after all" the way he saw it this was nothing more than "a belt and suspenders approach to the safety issue involved."
At that point I stood up and unbuttoned my jacket, revealing my belt and suspenders, and asked those assembled if anyone thought that a belt and suspenders approach to protecting peoples' lives was a bad idea.
Even the VP didn't answer that one.
They paid us close to 1.5 mil to move the cable.
Belt and suspenders can work, sometimes.
BTW, I wasn't wearing suspenders, I was wearing braces, and they were as much for decoration as for utility, I have some really fancy ones - and the belt carried my pager, radio, knife, utility tool, etc. In Texas it would also carry my holster.