Jasmine

Yesterday, I cleaned out a three-ring binder filled with outdated electrical training material I had put together for a grounding and bonding course. As I removed the papers, I fed them to a fire in my woodstove. One set of papers contained details from newspaper articles about a girl named Jasmine Flankey.

On July 4, 2009, Jasmine was electrocuted on the rooftop of a church in Missoula, Montana, while watching fireworks. She had touched a section of metal associated with an HVAC unit that had become electrically energized by an uncleared ground fault created by a lighting circuit within the church below.

Such energized metal is something we term as “above ground potential,” and 8-year-old Jasmine collapsed—never to rise again—the instant she touched it.

To this day, I use the story and circumstances of Jasmine Flankey’s death when I teach courses related to grounding and bonding. Something less than a dollar’s worth of materials used to electrically bond two sections of ductwork would have prevented this. When I tell this story, I also cite a half-dozen sections of Code that were put in place long ago to prevent circuits from developing such above ground potential.

Watching flames clutch and then consume the story of Jasmine as I pitched the papers into my woodstove forced something I can only describe as grief through me. But even with the papers gone, the name of Jasmine Flankey remains etched inside me.

—Mitchell Hegman