Electrical Contractor

RESIDENTIAL BY DAVID SHAPIRO

Relatively speaking—and only relatively, for two families had to leave their homes—this was an easy job and not just because there were no injuries. It was easy because it was a total rewire.

This is not always the case. After I’d been researching this topic for several weeks, I was again called in on the aftermath of a fire, though I didn’t even know it at the time.

The call came from a service that arranges repairs for homeowners. The representative told me that an elderly couple had lost their heat and asked if I could come out that day. With the temperature below freezing, this outage could involve life safety.

I called the landlady first. She told me the heat was off because the tenants had reported the fridge smelled bad for a few days. Today, they smelled burning. They called 911, and firefighters had pulled burning nonmetallic cable out of the wall near the fridge.

This was a new ball game. Whenever fire has been suppressed, I want to talk to the fire department before I do anything. I learned that the elderly couple had lost heat (and telephone service) to only part of the house. They had no place to move to, even temporarily. If they had lost all of their heat, I might have taken measures I normally wouldn’t consider to get their heating system functioning. They still didn’t have cooking facilities nor, I suspected, refrigeration. (Though I remember my father using a window box for refrigeration.)

I checked with the fire department,
talking with somebody who hadn’t been
involved in the previous call. He said his
records showed “an investigation,” not a
fire. There might be soot, but if I washed
my hands after I worked, I would be OK.

This seemed rather different from what I learned from an industrial hygienist at a fire training program, but I’ll get to that later this year.

I also contacted Prince George’s County, Md., chief electrical inspector, Robert Welborne. He has shown himself very ready to take calls at any time of day when they involve people’s safety or his inspectors’ ability to do their jobs correctly. I wanted to check procedures. It seemed likely that, if I needed to replace cables, I should pull a permit afterward and have my work inspected.

That showed a misunderstanding. Welborne told me that, before I did any replacement work, I would need to pull a permit for the new wiring. If power had been shut off to the building, I would also need to provide the fire department’s damage report before pulling the permit and doing the work.

Later, he clarified how we would decide what had to be replaced. If the meter had been pulled, he would call the fire marshal to have someone come out and evaluate how hot different areas had gotten, to determine whether equipment located there had better be replaced. If the fire suppression had involved hoses, he would presume any dry-location cable that had been soaked was compromised. If the meter hadn’t been pulled, I’d be the one to call it. (That challenge deserves its own column.)

Only after I pulled a permit, which had to wait for the damage report if firefighters had disconnected the service, would it be time to run the replacement wiring—normally.

Emergencies are different. If tenants had no heat in this otherwise habitable home, or had unlit stairs they needed to climb, or durable medical equipment needing juice, county law states he could have let me get them through the weekend and fill out the paperwork on Monday.

Obviously, this was not terribly good news for the homeowner. It was too late to pull a permit that Friday afternoon, so with the house remaining habitable, I’d have to wait until Monday. Monday morning, though, I received a call from the homeowner saying she had gotten somebody else to take care of it.

Maybe that meant someone else pulled a permit and replaced the damaged cable. Maybe, though, she couldn’t be bothered with the expense and the time investment required to follow the rules and found someone who would get it working without worrying about safety codes. Who was going to complain? The fire department? Way too busy. The handyman or side-jobbing electrician? They’re just happy to make the money.

Next month, I’ll look at other jurisdictions’ procedures and go a little further. A few months later, we’ll look at what’s needed to keep occupants—and ourselves—safe after home fires.

In a Fix
Restoring an electrical system after a fire

SOME YEARS BACK, I was called to a home where there had been a bad fire, originating in an adjacent townhouse. The damage was primarily from the water that prevented the house from becoming a torch. Afterward, the place was thoroughly stripped, and then we rewired.

SHAP IRO is the author of “Old Electrical Wiring,” “Your Old Wiring,” and co-author, with W. Creighton Schwan, of “Behind the Code.” He is a contractor, consultant, writer and local IAEI officer in Greenbelt, Md. He can be reached at writer@davidelishapiro.com. I S T