Lineman dies a month after falling from an electrical substation in Matanzas

The lineman Daniel Vega de la Cruz, a worker at the Matanzas Electric Company, died at the beginning of this month while recovering from the injuries he suffered when fall from the top of an electrical substation last February.

Vega, 47, died in the early hours of March 2 due to a deep vein thrombosis (blood clot), as reported this Wednesday by the official diary Giron.

He accident in which he was seriously injured occurred on February 6 at the substation located in San Juan, near the city of Matanzas. The worker suffered fractures of the hip and left femur.

In that place, the electrical power supply cable to the turbines installed in the wells to pump drinking water from the San Juan and Bello springs, the most important of the aqueduct located in El Naranjal, had broken. This breakdown interrupted the water supply in the upper and lower areas of the capital of Matanzas.

In a interview that Vega gave to the newspaper Giron three days before dying, said that in the early morning of that February day, when he and other linemen were trying to attach the cable to the electrical system, it grounded, and they had to climb to the top of the substation, in the middle of the darkness, to investigate the cause of the problem and correct it.

“I climbed with the means of protection, but one of the corners of that structure, to which the seat belt had been attached, broke due to the years of permanence in the place,” Vega revealed. “I collapsed, my left femur and hip were fractured, even the helmet I was wearing on my head broke in two.”

He then confessed that he had never suffered an accident of that nature before and recalled that he always advised his colleagues to use protective equipment. “It is, as I say, our life insurance,” he said. However, he attributed the accident to the fact that “as everything was dark, it could not be detected that that fraction of metal was in poor condition.”

The lineman was urgently taken to the Faustino Pérez Hospital, where he underwent operations on his femur and hip.

Unfortunately, He died almost a month after the accident, while recovering from surgeries.

Vega was born in Songo La Maya, Santiago de Cuba, on November 11, 1976, and went to live in Matanzas at the age of 11. At 21 he started as a lineman, following in the footsteps of Jaime, his older brother.

Regarding his job, which he carried out for 27 years, he confessed in the interview: “If you ask me what excites me most about what I do, I tell you that seeing people smiling after repairing any breakdown, and especially those who almost crying, they congratulate us when after several days or weeks they saw their houses illuminated again, after the scourge of hurricanes and cyclones (…) Do you want to see something more beautiful and exciting than that?”

Vega is survived by his wife Yariana and his children Carlos Daniel, Janier and Daniela, who are only nine years old..

In recent years, the death of several electrical workers has been reported due to accidents while on duty.

The lineman Edelin Ernesto Giro Torres, from the municipality of Santo Domingo, in Villa Clara, died after receiving an electric shock last October.

In November 2022, Jose Ignatius Rodriguez Antunez, a young man from Camagüey, 24 years old, died electrocuted in San Juan and Martínez, Pinar del Río, during the efforts to restore electrical service after the hit of Hurricane Ian.

A month before, others two workers from the Cuban Electrical Union also died after getting into an accident when they were repairing the power lines damaged by the meteorological event in Havana.