My aging eyes must be really going bad but what is all that black coily looking gook stuff in the bottom.
It also looks to me like someone might have lit a fire in the fireplace below judging from the black stringy stuff hanging in there and the black look of the cable between the meter and the panelboard. If the stringy looking stuff is spider webs covered with unburned carbon from a fire, I think a lot of very nice semiconductive paths might have an opportunity to occur with the attendant "carbon resistor" effect happening. What would the wattage rating of that kind of "resistor" be?
Hope the owners fire insurance is paid up.
