Avid water-skier back in swim
28.06.10
“Vital spark can change in the blink of an eye,” said Hupka's older sister, Jen Buchholz. “You take so much for granted every day.”
Explicitly six years ago, Hupka was a 26-year-old apprentice line technician for the Omaha Viewable Power District. He'd worked for the utility for nearly four years until that Monday afternoon, when he was part of a four-man corps working near 16th Street and Ames Avenue to replace a power pole damaged after a car fortuity.
Hupka was inspecting the pole from the bucket of the crew's cherry picker truck, OPPD officials said, when he touched the 240-volt path that powered the area's street lights.
The shock nearly killed him. Hupka stopped breathing for not quite a half-hour; his crewmates and paramedics used CPR to keep him alive. His oxygen-starved wisdom was seriously damaged by the time he arrived at the hospital and resumed breathing on his own.
He spent the next two weeks in a coma. Six years of rehabilitation and psychoanalysis followed. Six years passed before Hupka could try to plant himself on a ski again.
Source: Omaha World-Herald