CILACAP 1982 – AN ACCIDENT



In Indonesia people absolutely don’t adhere to the rules, let alone keep fixed arrangements, with a few exceptions maybe. So it is dangerous to trust someone who has your life in his hands. When you do, the following can happen to you. We unfortunately had to experience it. Imagine, suddenly there was a power failure in the part of Cilacap where we lived on the Gotot Soebroto 75. All was off during the morning, the air conditioning, the refrigerator and the freezer. Full of confidence a bus of the electricity company went to the power station and turned off the switches of the appropriate section. Then the bus drove to the electricity poles, along the main road under which we daily drove to or from the village, the school and the swimming pool. One of the men, using a ladder first, climbed in one of the electricity poles and went higher and higher. We saw him climbing up and thought that you definitely should have no fear of heights to do this job. The man in question had reached the right power cord, high in the air, crawled on the cord, hooked himself and sat down to work. What he did exactly, we didn’t know, but he sat quietly on the cord, just like an ape.

This was Indonesia though, as I mentioned before. A huge bang, yelling and screaming as if he was roasted on a spit, he suddenly hang under the cord, but didn’t fell off. To our bewilderment he was dead, stone-dead. Someone at the power station had passed the electricity cabinet, knew about the power failure and decided to turn on the switches to start the power again, not knowing that someone on the road was repairing a power cord. The cabinet stood open and the switch was turned down, that was what he noted.

Afterwards of course no one had done it and no one dared to do something, everyone was frozen with fright and so the poor dead man was hanging there for three long days. All the people from Cilacap who had to go to the village, school or swimming pool had to drive on the road with him hanging above it. None of the children and parents will ever forget that image. To our relief they finally took him down one night and he was buried with a lot of music.

Dinkie