On Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:46:54 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:
Tim Wescott wrote:
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:21:55 -0700, Gunner wrote:

Knives are tools and often made of metal
http://extras.thesun.co.uk/flash/kni..._07/index.html

Looks like you could fight that guy off with one squirt from a good fire
extinguisher.

No, wait...

The last fire I had was a breaker box. I turned on the AC and headed
to the kitchen. I heard what sounded like rain for a bedroom, and knew
the sky was clear, and there were no water lines near that room. I
limped in and saw flames coming out of the closed door. I knew that I
didn't have time to get to the extinguisher by the door, so I opened the
cover and turned off the power and beat the flames out with my hands.
Also, the extinguisher I had then wasn't rated for electrical fires. I
had some first degree burns on my hands, and couldn't get rid of the
smell of burnt Bakelite for a couple weeks. It took two years to get
all of the odor out of that room.

Let me guess - Federal Pacific Electric? Extremely Bad Juju...

The FPE main buss design is patently defective, they often tried to
run 100A through the threads of a steel 10-32 screw and/or an equally
small contact-area stab-in fitting stamped out of thin copper plate...

And the breakers go bad internally and look fine to the naked eye,
even turn on and off normally - but they will not trip open even on a
10KA-plus bolted fault, with the overload heaters glowing white hot...

The Korean knockoff replacement breakers are no better, they just
copied a defective design. If anyone still has old FPE panels in
service you seriously need to look into changing them.

It was the main breaker burning and one buss bar burnt in two. A few
more seconds, and the wood paneling would have caught fire. After that,
the whole house would have been on fire.

Not if you'd have left the door closed - that's the whole idea
behind UL insisting on the steel enclosure for breaker panels and
self-extinguishing plastics for switch boxes, so if something catches
fire on the inside it stays on the inside. At least long enough to
burn itself out.

If you had the box mounted deeper than flush into the wall, and the
cover was lifted off the rim of the breaker box and directly exposed
to wooden paneling butted up against it, that kind of gross stupidity
is NOT the fault of UL. If nothing else, the electrician should have
cut back the paneling and cut & glued in shims out of sheet-rock to
make a firebreak.

The nearest firehouse is over
five miles away, and there is heavy tourist traffic between here and
there.

The tourist traffic you can't do much about. But don't let your
neighbors install speed bumps on the only road in, no matter how much
they moan and whine about "all the people zooming down the streets..."
- because that firetruck has to slow down to a dead crawl to go over
every single speed bump so they don't drop the water tank onto the
road or break an axle.

Every speed bump adds thirty seconds to the FD response time.

And besides, it's usually their own kids or their kids friends doing
the speeding down the street at 2 AM, and they won't admit it. If
they can't properly discipline their own spawn, they don't get the
right to endanger my life and property by slowing down the FD or PD.

-- Bruce --