The Health and Safety at work act was 1974 I think Bren, might have taken a few years to get over the Irish Sea
We've also got the electricity at work act over here in the UK which pretty much states "we will not work live unless it's not possible under any circumstances to work dead". We can test live (because you can't prove dead otherwise) but any other live working requires some serious justification.
To give you another example of our network configuration that allows Bren and his teams to work dead but keep the customers on supply.
I had a farmer recently catch a stay wire in a mower. It snapped it and in the process dropped one phase of 11kv onto the ground. The protection didn't operate probably because everywhere was bone dry but it did get switched out by scada (telemetry) once reported.
Within an hour every customer except the one fed from the downed wire was back on supply and the linesman still hadn't made it to site. How ?? Our networks are built in rings with open points and lots of sectional switches. An engineer can operate the switches to "move the open point" to the faulty section.
Stu