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After Lineman is Electrocuted, West Plains Residents Spring into Quick Action

Scott Heidi, a homeowner in West Plains, is credited along with police officer Ivie Powell for saving lineman Dustin Ledbetter.
Scott Heidi, a homeowner in West Plains, is credited along with police officer Ivie Powell for saving lineman Dustin Ledbetter.

http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/after-lineman-electrocuted-west-plains-residents-spring-quick-action_80553.mp3

Good morning, and welcome back to our Sense of Community series on local heroes.  I’m Jennifer Davidson. This morning, we hear of a utilities repair job gone terribly wrong, and we’ll hear this story through the voices of three men who were there.

The day after Thanksgiving, 2013, homeowner Scott Heidi was home alone working in his yard, mowing his grass.  He accidentally bumped a transformer, and about 15 minutes later saw something that looked like water seeping out of it.

"I stopped and touched it, and it was actually oil.  I knew I had done something wrong. So I ran in the house and I called the city," Heidi recalls.

Dustin Ledbetter, a lineman for the City of West Plains, remembers getting the call and heading into work.

"I climbed off the truck, and proceeded to re-terminate the transformer...and that is the end of my story. That's all I can remember," Ledbetter says.  That's becuase at about that time, the transformer exploded with an enormous surge of electricity. Ledbetter was right there, and took a direct hit.

Heidi had been watching it all from his back window.

"It sounded like a bomb went off.  And it looked like somebody took a flash two feet from your face and lit up a flash," Heidi said.

Immediately, he said, he knew that the power had mistakenly been left on.

His wife, a Registered Nurse, wasn't home -- but she had trained him on CPR.  He made an immediate call to 9-1-1 as he ran out to see if he could help Ledbetter.

"Dustin was laying face down, and on fire -- everything was on fire.  He was unconscious, laying on his belly," Heidi recalls.

He called his wife and asked what to do for a major shock victim.  She confirmed that he needed CPR, so Heidi threw the phone down and began compressions and breaths to Ledbetter.

"I felt terrible. I felt, you know, that this was all my fault," Heidi said.  He couldn't get a pulse on Ledbetter.

Police Office Ivie Powell got a call from dispatch, and arrived on the scene in West Plains to see Heidi giving compressions.

"I then offered my assistance to Mr. Heidi as well, to do CPR, at which time I started compressions.  We tried to get a pulse, couldn't get a pulse," Powell said.

But he kept going with the compressions, until the ambulance arrived on the scene.  At one point, Ledbetter gasped for breath, and blood began to circulate back through his body. 

Emergency staff loaded Ledbetter into the ambulance, and rushed him into the hospital, where he began his recovery.

"There is no way I could ever thank them enough for saving me," Ledbetter said.

Now, Ledbetter is going to take some classes and try to become an electrical engineer.  He has two little girls, and another baby on the way.   Thanks to Scott Heidi and Ivie Powell, he says, he can raise a family and hopefully see his grandchildren one day.

Again, that was homeowner and high school instructor Scott Heidi, Lineman Dustin Ledbetter and Police Officer Ivie Powell.  

(To hear the audio for this story, you can click on the MP3 player above).