This week's question of the week deviates from the normal multiple choice question. Most everyone has a good story or two about electrical safety violations. Some are quite unique, some cause us to scratch our head, and some unfortunately lead to a tragic outcome.

So, here is this week's open ended question:

What is the worst or most unique electrical safety violation that you have seen (or created )

Your stories, pictures etc. are welcome and encouraged.

An engineer I was doing some work for had wired a 240v 3 phase machine control panel. He had used a 3 conductor piece of SO cord and used the green conductor as one of the hot wires, and then of course there was no ground. I was connecting a single phase motor to it, and used the same green wire to ground my motor. Wires melted but no one injured. The following converstion was more heated than the wiring.

Mostly back in the 80's when we would work on many things with the power on and never think twice about arc flash ( or the days of being covered in PCB oil from equipment ). It is a wonder I still have some hair and coherent thoughts.

I was on the accident investigation team that interviewed a man in the burn center. They tried to save his hands, but failed.

A couple years back we were commissioning some outdoor 480 volt power distribution centers. The back of one of the panels had been removed to facilitate thermography testing while under load. One of the construction electricians, evidently on q break, wandered into to our barricaded work area to see what we were doing, lit up a cigarette and started shooting the breeze with the commissioning crew. Before anyone could object, he casually turned his back on the exposed busbars and gesturing with his cigarette, rested his other elbow on the top live bus bar. Of course he got bit, cursed, and lurched away from the buswork. As I started to ask him if he was alright, he turned and stabbed his lit cigarette out on the busbar and got bit again! He was not seriously injured either time, but after evaluation at the aid station, was escorted from the worksite and not seen again.

Called out to resolve an electrical problem with a cupola furnace at 2 or 3 AM. When I arrived, the electrical foreman was busy cutting up strips of black rubber sheeting about 6" wide by about 18" long, disapprearing into an electrical cabinet with a couple cable ties, and then repeating the effort.

I asked what in the world he was doing and he said, "making rain hats". I asked, "For what?" He gave me the look of "are you stupid?" and replied, "for the instruments". I asked WHY would someone need rain hats for instruments inside of an electrical panel. Response: To avoid getting them wet. I asked, "How is the water getting inside a cabinet." Response was something like I don't know and if I'm stupid for asking a question because it wasn't his job to figure out how to protect the equipment, and some expletives about production personnel. This went on for a while before I said, "OK, move out of the way and give me one minute to look at it." I took one step in the cabinet with a flash light and looked up, and well let's just say it looked almost like a planetarium with all the holes from conduits that had never been covered. All this started from the roof above leaking a little on top of the cabinet.

I stepped back out and asked, "Have you ever heard of something called a hole cover?" More expletives. Foreman retrusned with a handfull of the kind that have the little spring clip legs. I said, "No. You need gasketed ones. With the dust, this is a minimum of a NEMA 12 area. With the rain, it's NEMA 3R. And since it's in the melt shop, don't consider anything less than NEMA 4. Those are NEMA 1." Answer: "I ain't never heard of such a thing."

About this time the maintenance superintendent arrived. He saw the argument. I said, "Just stick you head in an look up." He came back out, tossed his cigarette in the "this is embarrassing and makes me made" pose, and proceeded to tear into the electrical foreman and told him if he was going to waste that much time the least he could do is to put the rubber on top of the caibnet where it might do some good.

Later that day, we stocked up on gasketed hole covers and threw all the spring clip ones in the trash.

Same operation, there was a structural beam right over the taphole. During startup, the cupola has about 20-30 PSI of pressure from the molten metal. When they lance the frozen metal over the taphole, it does nt flow out...it sprays. Every 2 weeks like clockwork, electricians would replace a CAT 5 communication cable directly along the beam just above the taphole. That's above how long a PVC jacketed office grae CAT 5 lasted. Then the charge operator responsible for loading the furance would attempt to mix the proper amount of ingredients by hand while blind while the computer system was down. He had a massive panel of about 80 buttons and lights to work from for doing this and it looked like a mad monkey doing it. I think it helped to have an energy drink while performing the task. This panel was in the same work station but the communication cable went via another route around the taphole area instead of through it. I asked how often the cable was burned up...answer was never. I asked why we couldn't run the CAT 5 on the same route. Answer was because it would take "forever". I asked how long "forever" was. Answer: All day. I said, so this happenes every 2 weeks and we spend 2 hours with 2 men "fixing" it when we could spend 8 hours permanently fixing it. Answer: yes.

Same operation, I also learned about how to drill out and retap the bus bars (live) when you use a different manufacturer to point a 15 A breaker into a lighting panel, and I also learned how to clean up the contacts and/or fix a broken contactor that wasn't pulling in. It is best to use the wooden/plastic back of a hammer to hit it instead of using the metal part to avoid damage and arcing. Both are clearly useful life skills that I did NOT take with me. This is the one place that I had to simply increment them into following Code rather than using Code as any kind of guide for how to do things, at least at first. We still had the screw-in Edison style fuse panels too, pennies and all! They didn't want to upgrade because the panel "never tripped" and was working much better than the other production line which had a modern panelboard with circuit breakers in it.

Another site, another large furnace. Task was to upgrade the controls. This is a burner system that runs coal. Original design had a single "bypass" button on a 1960's vintage control panel...you know the type, roughly 8 feet tall and 12 feet long covered in discrete pneumatic controllers. Operators were pissed with the new controls because there was no "bypass" on the burner safety system, and it didn't accomodate either a pen knife, or using a toothpick to jam into the button and hold it in so that they never had problems with the equipment tripping out.

And a personal one. When I was growing up, my grand daddy told me that if I just used my two fingers to test for live wires, that was the easiest method. Only don't make hard contact...just touch it real quick. My daddy of course told me that grand daddy shouldn't be doing that, and I should consider safety. As you touch your fingers over time, it destroys the nerve endings in your fingers and you need your sense of touch. It is a much better approach to use the back or edge of your hand where you don't really need those nerve endings anyways, and you can just slap the terminals instead of having to touch and then pull back. I pointed out that it hurt like hell either way and that I didn't have to feel the pain if I just used a cheap meter. Answer was you should get used to pain in life, and that sometimes the meter doesn't work or you just don't have one nearby. And that you should always use your hand because sometimes meters don't work (batteries dead). Bear in mind...I was born in 1970, and I just rolled my eyes and kept using my meter for that kind of stuff. Sometimes you should NOT listen to your elders.

Many years ago whilst working in the Middle East, my client had an issue with lots of fuses blown on his LV system (400V Motor Control Centre). Apparently proper HRC fuselinks were not easy to obtain, or cost a lot, so they used an alternative solution. According to the site engineer, he had some fusewire which he wrapped around the outside of the blown fuselink. 1 x wire = 5 amps. Simple.
As my involvement was elsewhere on the plant it was really not my place to complain, but after making my feelings known I made a point of never visiting that particular MCC room again. I dread to think what the board would have looked like after a few short circuit or overload events.

Trying to disconnect a circuit breaker for a single receptacle, it is suppose to be easy. I started checking the circuit breakers and I was turning off one at the time and I was not being able to disconnect the power to the receptace. I had to turn off the whole panelboard for the power to turn off to this receptacle. So I started turning on one at the time the circuit breakers and found that there were two circuit breaker that were feeding this single receptacle!!!

When I worked as an electrician for a contractor, one customer was a flashlight/battery manufacturing plant. The building was built in the 40s and lots of the wiring was done by the electricians (?). They were often quite proud of all the installations they had done by themselves over the years. Here in Vermont they didn't have electrical licensing until 1970 and there was likely no actual training for these maintenance workers. I had run into many installations that used conductors that were sized or colored incorrectly. When I'd ask why they used three white 3 AWG conductors for a 480 vac three phase feeder he said, "they made us use what we had", which I know was baloney as this fellow wouldn't hesitate to do this again if the black wire was back in the shop and the white wire was closer. But the 'best' I saw while doing a demolition for a renovation was a 120 volt circuit which included a single green 12awg conductor on a 20 amp circuit breaker which then went into a 1/2' RMC conduit. No other wires, just the one, 'hot' green conductor. It did have a load on it but I wasn't able to readily find the end of this circuit. They were not so proud of this one install however. Since then the corporate offices required the old electrical staff to get their state journeyman's licenses. It was no small feat at their ages, close to retirement for the most part.

If you walk into this kind of mess, it takes a while to get buy-in. Where I currently work, I pretty much have to deal with EVERY Code out there...ABS (maritime), FM, NEC, NESC, and some even more obscure than this. Some are required, some aren't. So generally speaking I approach it from three directions. NEC covers the vast majority of utilization equipment and is mandated by statutes for most areas although enforcement is typically only for new construction, not existing plants, irrespective of whether state law makes it mandatory for remodelling/maintenance or not as a practical matter. The second direction is that over and above what is regulatory, if for instance something happens and an accident investigation (and litigation) ensues and I can state that we follow a natinally recognized consensus safety standard (Code), then the Code becomes essentially my expert witness and it becomes an affirmative defense that we did everything possible following generally recognized and accepted safety practices. If we don't follow a Code, we have to argue the safety of the design/installation from an engineering perspective which makes for a weak argument in court. Chances are that OSHA or others will actaully use the Code as reference for an enforcement action. The third reason is that regardless of whether it is mandatory or not, as a standard for quality control even if it is as a certain TV personality states a "minimum standard", it is still pretty good and keeps you out of trouble. I have had vastly fewer problems following codes as a minimum standard. Managers need to hear the first two arguments. Electricians need to hear the third argument. Over time at first there is resistance but when they see that the cost is the same and the number of problems is greatly reduced by following Code for solutions to repairs, they will eventually come around at which point you can introduce the safety and legal arguments once they are receptive to seeing how it is done to code.