John, it's nothing personal - or even really aimed at you at all.
I haunt a number of forums, and it's amazing some of the misconceptions and mis-identifications that are out there. Sometimes I get overly detailed in my posts, because I'm thinking of some bits of confusion I've encountered elsewhere.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this in a non-residential setting. That's generally where the attitude of "get it done NOW" and "get it done CHEAP" are all too common.
I seem to remember a posting on this board about an electrical closet with a transformer that was fed by cables laying on the floor that were fed by an open panel with 'protective cardboard' over the live bus...and THAT particular installation was many months old.
Yes, it is a 3-phase panel. The arrangement of the neutral buss leads me to suspect that this is a dayed panel; it looks like a "Myers" panel I encountered on another job, which would use Cutler-Hammer breakers as replacements.
This was probably installed long before there even were ground wires. I would suspect that the wall is masonry, and the back of the panel simply rusted apart. The wood is a repair.
