A Belco engineer was killed due to a series of ‘misadventures', a Coroner's Inquest ruled yesterday.

Acting Magistrate Justin Williams heard the inquest into the circumstances surrounding the death of Malik Blyden on July 28, 2003.

Mr. Blyden suffered first and second degree burns after an explosion at the Belco sub-station on the Railway Trail, in Southampton.

Mr. Williams concluded that Mr. Blyden's death was the result of a number of errors and oversights made by both Mr. Blyden and his supervisor that day, Belco underground foreman Gladwyn Wolffe.

He said Mr. Blyden's failure to identify the proper testing probe was the fatal error made that day.

Additional errors included the premature removal of a safety lock by Mr. Wolffe and failure to follow Belco standard operating procedures for testing electrical cables.

Mr. Wolffe, Darren Vickers (who had been Mr. Blyden's partner that day), Sgt. Larry Stevens of the Bermuda Fire Service and Belco's Training and Safety Officer Tara Soares all participated in the inquest.

Dr. Kered James, Director of Pathology at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, read portions of the autopsy report written by Dr. Francis P. Kuhajda of the Bayview Medical Centre, a branch of Johns Hopkins Medical Centre in Maryland.

Mr. Blyden had been transferred to Johns Hopkins from KEMH for skin graft treatments. Dr. James also read portions of a report by Dr. Edward Shultz, the director of the KEMH Emergency Department.

The autopsy report read in court cited the cause of death as complications from three conditions - acute necrotising pneumonia, burn injuries to over 48 percent of the body and polymicrobial sepsis.

It was determined that many of Belco's standard operating and safety procedures were violated on the day of the explosion.

The inquest heard that Mr. Blyden had not been wearing safety gloves while testing the cables - a standard precaution mandated by Belco's safety rules.

And the inquest heard that Mr. Blyden, fatally, inserted a test probe into a buzz bar - which is always live. Reportedly, there are two such bars on the unit on which Mr. Blyden had been working.

Each is colour-coded in order to distinguish between the one that is always live and the other that is dead.

Procedure called for Mr. Blyden to run voltage through the dead bar in order to test the new cable that had been installed.

In actuality, Mr. Blyden inserted the test probe into the live bar, which caused electricity to be conducted with such intensity that an explosion occurred.

Mr. Blyden's burn injuries resulted from this explosion.