Near miss at work. Almost bought the farm.

I had to work graveyard shift last night 7pm to 7am. It started raining hard around 9pm and I had an equipment failure in the screen room that Evergreen Pulp pays me to operate. I went out and discovered that one of the drains was plugged up and the screen room was flooded. I opened the drain with a rake after wading through a lot of water. I then traced down the piece of equipment that failed. It looked operable. It is a conveyor that tranfers material to a chip hogging system. Along side the conveyor is a safety pull cord and safety box unit that was just replaced. I tripped the safety cord and reset it again to see if that was the issue. It would not start. The Shift Electrician came over and checked the circuit breakers and said it should run, and he manually jumped it and it in fact ran. He told me to reset the conveyor at the safety cord box again, and just as I was approaching the conveyor, it lit up in sparks and must have shorted out! I would have been holding onto a live electrical unit of 440 volts in inches of water if I had been there a moment sooner! God must have not called my number up yet. The Electricians were able to jumper out and bypass the safety box so we could run for the night. We were within a few minutes of having to shut down production, which is quite costly at Evergreen. So there you go. Life in the trenches mill worker wise can be scary. The job is not all glamour after all!