Aaa!

A little scraping with a metal wire brush and she'll be fine.

What I find amazing is that nothing in there tripped. They probably ran the sump pumps off electricity from that panel!

What does that tell us?
Tap water is often less conductive than you'd think!

Wow. Good point Ranger. What township/borough was this in?

Ian A.

Less conductive than many think but still plenty of conductivity to deliver a fatal shock.

man, those service conductors are freakin' DUST, that thing looks like it was just pulled up from the Titanic!

Electrolysis at work, baby! Look at that neutral.

I'm still amazed that nothing tripped, that water would have needed an impedence of better than sixteen ohms to avoid tripping out a 15A breaker on a leg-to-leg fault. Given all the contaminants that I'm sure were floating around in it, I'm amazed it was that resistive.

Maybe the water itself kept the breakers from operating? The cooling would mess up the thermal characteristics and the water itself would foul the mechanism?

On a side note, can you imagine coming home and opening your basement door to find water lapping at the top step? That must've been horrifying.

-John

'Kid, this is in Bensalem.

To some extent I can... About 1 1/2 years ago I came home to a sound of heavily running water. When I went down into the dark basement fumbling for the light switch I thought: "What's that weird feeling around my shoes???" Looked down to realize I was wading in almost 2 inches of water...

Some ingenious kid had turned on the sink at full blast, filling it with more water than the drain could take... go figure. Took three of us more than half an hour with buckets and shovels.

I have always wondered what would happen in this case. In our area in 1996, we had a huge flood. Many basements went under. It was a while ago, so I don't remember much of what happpened. If the panel is on, and the water is contaminated enough to conduct, wouldn't this short the mains causing the PoCo OCPD to trip?

In the same flood, in one neighborhood, a poco pole transformer was hit by lightning. This took out power to the whole neighborhood, causing sump pumps to stop and basements to flood. I got home to find that a friend of mine had borrowed every extension cord I owned and was using them to run sump pumps in that neighborhood. It was, umm, lets say, interesting.

Love that lace of white chalk for a nuetral.

Hey wait, is that drain board behind the panel?

Unlikely. Primary fuses rarely go due to arcing on the secondary. Take a look at this thread.

It makes me wonder what would cause the primary fuse to open. Last summer, the underground primary behind my house faulted and blew the fuses in the two adjacent padmounts. I heard a loud pop in the back yard, and I knew it was a primary fuse. I called the utility and told them exactly which transformers were dead, then I waited up until about 12:30 AM to watch the lineman work. He blew two fuses trying to get the fault to clear itself, then finally bolted it and took out the entire street. That's when he said he needed backup. The power came on shortly after I went to bed. They must have cut out the bad cable. I saw the new one laid out near a manhole at the end of the block the next week.

I guess a bolted short on the secondary transformer bushings might blow the fuse, but after looking at these photos... well, I always was careful about how I brace my masts, but nothing like an eye-opener!

Sometimes it may not take much to pop a primary fuse. The old "can" out front of here I can remember its primary fuse blowing many times. No real reason just overload I think as it ALWAYS happened around 4-6 PM, middle of summer on stinkin' hot days. Got to the point where the PoCo troubleman and I knew each other by name!
I finally squaked about it and they came out and replaced the can, putting in one thats electrically identical in size, just bigger physically to hold more cooling oil, and apparently its fused the same (20A I think they said)... No problems since. Maybe they used one of them new "metric 20A fuses" ..


A.D