I had a service call yesterday to a bar with five ceiling fans on one switch that would trip the breaker when they tried to switch them on. I thought I'd try the old light bulb method. It worked great and I located the shorted fan in short order(no pun intended). It was a H-G fault to the emt. This got me thinking, when the light bulb in series allowed the breaker to remain closed and current to flow with a H-G fault existing, it seems that this would place the return current on the grounding system, in this case, the emt. It could pose a fire or shock hazard.
Any thoughts here? Am I off base?