Electrician Derek Mast shares how an arc flash on the job left him with severe burns

NEED TO KNOW

• Derek Mast suffered severe burns on 19% of his body after an arc flash accident at work
• His recovery has included skin grafts and occupational therapy, but he lost his fingerprints in the accident
• Mast shares his journey online, connecting with others who’ve had similar experiences for support and encouragement

Derek Mast has been an electrician for 18 years, primarily in the solar industry, working as a maintenance technician or commissioning technician for the last eight years. 

In June 2026, Mast, 35, tells PEOPLE he was working on large switchgear, doing typical troubleshooting, when he experienced an arc flash due to a shorted piece of equipment.

The certified master electrician says that most people have “probably seen an electrical arc happen in their lives at some point, whether you touch a doorknob and you see that tiny little blue spark jump from your finger to the doorknob when you get static shock.” 

An arc flash, he explains, “is just a very big one of those where the air gets super heated, there’s plasma, temperatures can be up to the surface of the sun.”

“Even though a lot of them are very fast, like mine was, a fraction of a second, it burned very quickly and very, very badly,” Mast shares. “It’s a big deal if an arc flash happens to someone on the job.”

While it happened quickly in reality, Mast says it “felt like it took forever.” 

“I remember thinking that it was multiple minutes long,” the Pennsylvania electrician shares. “It was very hot, it was very loud. I could hear the buzzing of the 60 Hz AC frequency.”

“It feels like it lasts forever and you have all this time to think and realize what’s happening. I knew what was happening immediately. I had no idea that what I was touching had been hot, but obviously it was based on the outcome,” he continues. “Thoughts of death, thoughts of what my family is going to do, thinking about the people that I was not sure if I was just about to leave behind and whether this was the last thing I would see.”

While the sudden and powerful explosion of electrical energy through the air can be powerful enough to kill someone, Mast survived, but it left him with burns on 19% of his body, including his hands, arms and face.

Once he was able to move, he tried to call 911, but his fingertips were burned off, and the phone didn’t register his hands.

“I could see my arms had flaking, burnt skin. My fingertips wouldn’t work on a touchscreen properly, and so it felt like forever to call 911,” he recalls. “When I look back at the time code, it felt like it took five minutes to call them, but it took me a minute, which is still a long time when your hands are in searing pain.”

Thankfully, the owner of the system he was working on was in earshot, and he called 911 to get Mast to the local hospital. When he got to their ER, Mast was medevacked to the burn unit, where he was put on a ventilator to debride his wounds. 

Doctors then cleaned his wounds and scraped off the non-viable skin before performing a skin graft on his left hand that covers his index finger, middle finger, and thumb, and two-thirds of the back of his hand. 

“After they finally got me off the ventilator, it was about 48 hours or so, then it was going through the, ‘All right, now we get to repair all this, let all this heal, and do the daily dressings and make sure that things are progressing and all that,’” he says. “From the time I woke up to when I was discharged was a lot of rest and dressing changes and making sure things were coming along.”

Mast says his wife has been key in his recovery process, taking care of all the dressing changes and cleaning his wounds.

A week and a half after the incident, his wounds were finally closed, and the aftercare began. However, recovery has been a long process, and Mast only recently got to a point where he could use his hands again.

“I can grab things with either hand. I can’t grab all things with either hand. Like my left hand, I need to stretch out my thumb webbing a lot more. I can’t easily pick up something as thick as a Mason jar with my left hand,” he shares. “[With] my right hand, it’s hard for me to close it all the way. I can close it all the way, but it takes a lot of stretching and moisturizing. I’m doing occupational therapy exercises three times a day, more for some other aspects of it that’s a little bit less intense.”

Mast has yet to return to work, noting that “it feels like you have to be off work for longer than you feel like you should be.”

“The first four weeks of recovery, there is just so much insane progress that you make because the wounds heal pretty fast. Your body’s whole job is fixing wounds and sleeping and eating. Once all those wounds are closed up, it’s the less glamorous work of making sure the scars are stretching and that you keep your compression sleeves on,” Mast shares. 

While he’s been trying to do chores and help around the house, “the energy is not where I’m used to it being because it’s still got a lot of work to do.”

“There will come a time, maybe in the next month or two, where I’ll get put on modified work from my doctor, so doing lighter stuff, busy things, things like that. It might be another few months after that ‘til I’m cleared for doing hands-on stuff,” he tells PEOPLE. “I know about someone who had similar injuries who I think took eight months from his incident to get back to work. Everybody’s a little bit different, but it does seem like it’s always a little bit longer than one feels like it should be.”

Mast has been sharing his experience on social media as a way to process what happened to him and talk to others who have dealt with similar situations.

He recently went viral on TikTok for sharing how losing his fingertips — and therefore a piece of his identity — has been especially hard to deal with.

“So, it’s funny, the one thing I didn’t think would be that emotional — as I’m like processing the outcome of being arc flashed and having burns on both my hands— is that I don’t have fingerprints anymore,” he shared in the video. “I don’t know why that bothers me as much as it does.”

“I mean, maybe on my right hand they’ll come back depending on how bad the burns were, but I think the burns were probably bad enough that they’re not gonna come back from underneath the scar tissue,” he continued, noting that there isn’t a surgery or something to bring something like that “back.”

Processing the traumatic experience out loud and online has been “very therapeutic,” Mast tells PEOPLE.

“It’s been a really great community as I’ve been posting about this to TikTok and then also to YouTube, sharing my experience,” he says. “Personally, I’ve generally found when you’re going through hard things, it is much better in the long run if you let the feelings happen as they come to you, and that’s what I’ve been trying to practice as I get a flashback. I don’t get flashbacks all that commonly, but when I do, I try to allow it to envelop me in the moment and sit there and let me experience it instead of pushing it away.”

Mast says it’s also been “definitely helpful” to connect with other people online who are further along in their recovery.

“It’s genuinely encouraging, and I really enjoy talking with other people and seeing their pictures… because there’s not a lot of people that have this experience and have somebody to talk to about it, because it’s supposed to be rare,” Mast shares. “It is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty rare, and we’re working on making it rarer. It’s been good to build that community, see what other people’s stories are like, and compare notes so that we all know that we’re not crazy, and we just got to get through it together.” 

Source link