I'm retiring in 20 days from the power company after 44 1/2 years. I'm very thankful to have been taught very early on as a young lineman to watch out for the Ding Dongs with rigged up generators. After the big ice storm right before Christmas in Tulsa, OK in 2007, one of said Ding Dongs dumbassed his disconnect procedure on his huge portable generator when we got the power to his street back on. He forgot to disconnect his generator before he flipped his main breaker back on. He was back feeding the panel with another breaker below the main. It went KABOOMYOW right in hs face, blew up his panel, backfed onto the energized power lines and burnt all of the backlot lines that fed his house and 9 others. After a week of being without power, they had to be out another night because we had to quit in time to drive back to NW Arkansas where our hotel rooms were. One of the lineman came over the radio and said "At least we will be able to get a truck to the pole tomorrow. His neighbors are gonna burn his house down tonight and we can back the bucket truck across the slab and reach the pole!"
Thank you to the OP, who intends to do it right! [/quote]

I'm too a retired lineman and your story reminds me of one we had happen in an ice storm. Overhead service was broke and laying on ground. Transformer and circuit was dead. No generator. We were attaching service back on house with the pole end still on the ground and were getting shocked on the neutral. What the heck??? It was in a crappy old neighborhood with trash everywhere. Low and behold the genius ran an extension cord under the trash from neighbors basement window to his basement window and hooked up his furnace fan. He hooked it up backwards and had the neutral hot casing us to get shocked. Luckily no one got hurt! And really lucky it was backward so we found it or otherwise someone could have got killed when it backfeed the transformer when we hooked it up.