A wrongful death case has been opened on behalf of two E.P.C. employees who were electrocuted Saturday morning while fixing a transformer box in southeastern Yangon’s Dawbon Township, a police officer has told Coconuts Yangon.
“A wrongful death case has been opened to investigate the cause of the electrocution and who is responsible,” the Dawbon police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said via phone.
The faulty transformer had caught fire early Saturday, and three E.P.C. employees arrived to fix it.
“That transformer box gives electricity to the entire neighborhood. It was on a utility pole. At 6:30 in the morning, the transformer caught on fire. People from the neighborhood called the EPC office and they turned the electricity off,” a local woman told Eleven Media.
When the electricity was off, two E.P.C. employees climbed the utility pole to fix the damaged transformer box. However, the electricity had allegedly been turned on again.
“When the three officials came and assessed the situation, two went up the utility pole to fix the box. While they were fixing it, an explosion happened and one died immediately. The other died later in the hospital. Nothing happened to the other one,” the woman said.
After the two men were fatally injured, a local man who spoke with Eleven Media alleged that he overheard the third employee yelling into the phone, “Why did you turn on the electricity?”
An employee reached at the EPC offices declined to comment when Coconuts Yangon called this afternoon.
The case is just the latest in a series of electrocutions in the Yangon area that highlights the losing battle that Yangon authorities are fighting against crumbling infrastructure, worsening weather and an unresponsive bureaucracy.
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