Lewis Wheelan's journey into hell

He was just 19, six feet tall, a strapping, 195-pound former member of Sir James Dunn Eagles football team.

Lewis Wheelan was back in the Soo after finishing his first year at Wilfred Laurier University. It was May, 2001, and Wheelan had what seemed like a great job for the summer -- $10 an hour cutting overgrown trees near Great Lakes Power lines.

He showed up for work wearing a squeaky-new pair of safety boots, a friend's safety goggles, and his dad's yellow hardhat.

All that wasn't enough to protect Wheelan from what happened one hour into his second day on the job.

Triple amputee

Weeks later, he woke up in Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital. A fiery 7,200-volt power line had fallen across his body. As a result, he had lost two legs, his right arm and his right shoulder.

This past weekend, a Toronto newspaper devoted 3,900 words (four times the length of a longish piece in the Sault Star) to Wheelan's story.

The article, by investigative reporter Moira Welsh, contains cameo appearances by Mayor John Rowswell and Mike McEwen, the chief executive officer of Great Lakes Power.

Welsh's piece is sharply critical of Great Lakes Power and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

Great Lakes Power

Written in narrative prose, the Star article describes:

- How five years earlier, Great Lakes Power had laid off its highly trained foresters, contracting out the work of keeping "danger trees" away from its power lines

- How a job east of the Sault, involving 50-year-old cables and trees that hadn't been cut in years, so concerned the contractor that he asked Great Lakes Power to inspect the job from a safety standpoint.

- How the contractor asked, without success, that the power be turned off while the job was underway.

- How Lewis Wheelan was put to work on this job without any training.

- How Wheelan was so badly injured that "his right arm looks like a stick of charcoal and is connected to his shoulder by a single thread of muscle. A doctor takes Lewis' arm in his hands and, ever so gently, pulls it off his body."

- Wheelan's long road to recovery, including his emotional response to last year's victory by Sir James Dunn Eagles at York University, when the team handed the championship trophy to Lewis and was photographed clustered around him.

- His lengthy battle for compensation from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which initially wanted to pay him just $288 a week.

- How Mayor Rowswell called Wheelan's father, repeatedly telling him how badly Great Lakes' Mike McEwen felt about the accident.

- How McEwen finally visited Wheelan in Sunnybrook Hospital, offering condolences but no financial assistance.

Provincial investigation

According to the Star article, the Ontario Ministry of Labour is investigating the accident and has until May 30 to decide whether charges should be laid.

To read the Toronto Star article, click on this.

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