Friday said:
Great, you're hoping I die for asking questions.
Nice guy.
I didn't say I was going to do it. I said I've seen it done and asked
for intelligent FACTS about the subject.
When was I glib?
NO. I'm hoping that if you undertake to back feed your houses wiring
that if anyone is killed it is you. I never said you should be killed
for asking questions.
As for providing you with the applicable facts in an internet posting it
simply cannot be done. I have been installing and servicing power
systems for most of my adult life. It would take a book to provide you
with all of the sneak current paths I have encountered over those years.
I thought it was pretty glib of you to say that only stupid people would
forget to open the main breaker. Fatigued, drug or alcohol impaired, or
over stressed people who are not stupid can and have made that mistake.
Not all panels have a single main breaker. Some have four or six and
one of those mains would be the dryer outlet while another would be the
stove outlet and so forth. In order to get power into those homes you
would have to close one or more of the main breakers each of which is
connected to the service entry conductors from the service drop or
lateral and thus to the transformer. Federal Pacific two pole breakers,
of an extensive number of production runs, will fail closed after a very
limited number of manual or automatic operations. I have seen other
brands fail closed as well usually from internal corrosion secondary to
water following the service conductors to the main breaker from the
service entry cable.
I am a firefighter and I have responded to a child shocked by a suicide
cord as well as to a tree worker electrocuted by a generator back feed.
The injured child was shocked after a playmate found a double male cord
hanging in the garage and plugged it in. When the child touched the
exposed pin on the other end he received a shock that fortunately did no
permanent harm. He was treated for a small The cord had been made up
by the landlord to bridge out an open circuit in order to avoid the cost
of an electrician on a service call. The circuit continuity had failed
at a push in terminal receptacle. After the tenant had demanded the
repair of the circuit through the city housing office the landlord had
stored the cord for future use.
The back feed death occurred during the 1988 micro burst clean up in the
Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. A tree trimming crew was clearing
limbs and trees off of power lines so that they could be rebuilt. The
power was out over a very large area and some of the sub stations had
been taken off line and grounded out to facilitate the tree work. When
my engine arrived on scene we were met by the owner of that family
owned, two truck, tree trimming company begging us to get his son down.
He had come in contact with a 13.9 kilovolt line that was energized
through a neighborhood transformer from the only service drop that was
still intact. That drop was to a home were the back feed was coming
from. Another fire fighter used one of our fiberglass pike poles as a
hot stick to open the fuse above the transformer while I pulled the
homes meter. We then brought the tree worker down and attempted CPR and
applied an automated external defibrulator. The tree worker did not
recover and was pronounced dead after nearly an hour of resuscitative
effort at the hospital emergency department less than five minutes from
the scene.
Several utility workers have been killed by back feeds from generators.
A search of the FACE reports on the OSHA web sight will bring up
several examples. In one case, in Georgia, the line had been grounded
out but the lineman had failed to notice that the grounding wire on the
pole had been broken by a motor vehicle. Since that incident occurred
during the clean up after hurricane Hugo the Multi Grounded Neutral
(MGM) that should have provided a perfectly safe ground had been broken
into short segments by falling limbs. With the only grounding electrode
conductor that was still attached to that segment of the MGM damaged
near the base of the pole the protection of the grounding was lost.
I'm a sore looser when it comes to the death of young healthy people who
are killed by the negligent actions of others.
