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A mother told her son to take care moments before he was fatally electrocuted by a low-hanging power cable while on a run, an inquest heard.
John Henry Oates, 29, known as Harry, was killed instantly when after running into the faulty cable on a public footpath in Cumbria in 2023.
His father, Malcom Oates, 68, discovered his body five minutes from their family home on October 27, 2023.
The family blames Electricity North West (ENWL) for Harry’s death, but the inquest fell short of finding the company responsible.
Harry’s mother, Ros Oats, recalled the last thing she said to her son before he left on his run.
She told The Telegraph: ‘I said to him, “Take care”‘, to which he responded, ‘Don’t worry, mum.’
He said he had ‘a drink, a snack, a telephone and a foil blanket – I will be fine.’
Mrs Oates added: ‘I watched him run down our garden and out into the field. That was the last time I saw him alive.’
John Henry Oates, 29, (pictured) known as Harry, was fatally electrocuted after coming into contact with a low hanging power cable during a run close to his family home in Cumbria
His mother Ros (pictured) told Harry to ‘take care’ moments before his death. Malcom, Harry’s father (pictured), later his son’s body on a footpath five minutes from their home
Harry had been visiting his family home for a weekend of cycling, golf and running from his Bristol job as an aircraft engineer. He had just had an offer accepted on his first flat.
When he did not return from his run, Harry’s brother thought to track his phone, thinking perhaps he had dropped it.
Mr Oates described the moment he found his son’s body: ‘I was walking along the footpath and could see in the distance something white on the floor, perhaps some farm debris.
‘As I got closer, I could see that it was Harry. I could see there was a cable across his throat.
‘He was lying prone on the floor with his head and neck elevated. maybe a foot, 18 inches, with a cable burnt halfway through his throat. It was black and singed, and you could see the bone. That’s the harrowing scene I was presented with.’
He made a ‘surreal’ phone call to Mrs Oates to tell her the terrible news while standing over his son’s body.
Mr Oates later learned that the power cable had been down for two days but had not touched the ground, so was still live.
Emergency services took two hours to make the body safe, by which time two engineers from ENWL showed up, as they had noticed the power had gone down when Harry came into contact with it.
Harry was a Bristol based aircraft engineer and had just had an offer accepted for his first flat. Here he is pictured at his friend’s wedding a week before his death
Since then, the Oates family has not heard anything from ENWL, Mr Oates said.
The cable had been hanging across the path due to a ‘rare and complex’ circumstance where the porcelain insulators at the top of the telegraph pole failed, causing the line to bow into the path, the inquest heard.
Mr Oates took issue with this, claiming the presence of voids – microcracks in the insulators which can cause them to fail – was ‘well known in the industry’.
He added that the insulators that had failed had been put up in 1959, saying that the use of these old porcelain disk insulators should have been stopped ‘years ago’ by ENWL if safety was its ‘top priority’.
Following Harry’s death, ENWL found that 73 per cent of the 260 insulators they tested across their network contained voids.
The company has since discontinued the use of these porcelain disk insulators and has begun a programme to replace them at around 8,000 locations, the inquest heard.
Mr Oates said the large number of these potentially dangerous types of insulators in use in ENWL’s territory was concerning, asking ‘how many is that nationwide?’
A spokesman for ENWL said: ‘Our heartfelt sympathies remain with Harry Oates’ family at this time. This was a tragic incident which both the coroner and Health and Safety Executive noted involved a rare and complex sequence of events that were unforeseeable.
‘Safety is our number one value, and we will continue to work with other distribution network operators and the industry trade body, ENA, on learnings from this immensely sad accident.’
In 2012, Dr James Kew was killed in similar circumstances after being hit by a fallen electricity cable while running along a footpath in a field in Newport, Essex. The line had also become loose after the porcelain insulator had failed, the Health and Safety Executive said.
UK Power Networks was fined £1million after it was found they had been alerted of the low-hanging line by a couple and had not immediately de-energised the network. Instead, they sent an engineer out, who arrived 20 minutes after Dr Kew was killed.
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