Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Ignorant Lazy Fool almost causes a fatal Electrocution when he improperly wires a Plug on a machine

I was recently called by an electrician friend who was having problems with a machine at a manufacturing plant in a rural Pa county
For months the machine was being run with out the ground wire attached to the machine and when they moved it down to the new building  for him to hook up he noticed the ground wire was off and when he attached it the breaker immediately popped . Concerned there was a major issue and not being familiar with the electronic drives in the machine he asked me to look at it when I got a chance in mean time he marked the machine not to be used . But before I could get to the plant that morning a supervisor received a nasty electrical shock when he touched the machine and a metal air supply line. after ignoring the warning.
I got on site and started testing and got shocked my self when I went to kneel and used the machine to hold on to. Yes there was something very wrong with this machine this never should happen worse yet the GFCI Ground Fault Circuit interrupter did not trip like it should.
  After about 20 minutes of testing and checking wires in the machine thinking I had a hot wire pinched in the machine and not getting the expected results on my meter I then unhooked the incoming wires and to my surprise the machines metal case was still hot it was at this moment I knew what had happened .
Some Idiot machine mechanic wired the plug on the machine wrong .
he wired the hot and neutral conductors backward and was feeding 120 volts directly into the machines frame. White should be on silver screw and black on brass  but as you can see in picture this is not the case  when we confronted this ass hole as to why he had messed with the electrical wiring on the machine as he has no training or certification to do so he said the machine came in that way . Sorry this is not the case.
We spoke to his supervisor and he will be losing his job for what they pay him he can be replaced with a tech that knows what he is doing . He had no business going anywhere near the electrical devices on the machine he could have gotten some one killed as water is often splashed about  and some one stepping in the water and touching the machine could have been grabbed by the electric and not be able to let go.  But since the plant does not have a full time electrical repairman this is a very common problem I see all the time non qualified individuals doing repairs they should not be doing.  . Had some one gotten shocked bad enough to receive hospital care and OSHA would have been notified the plant owners could face massive fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars and
the plant could end up out of business because no one would want to write an insurance policy for them due to there negligence not to address this issue earlier on. OSHA rules demand only qualified individuals due machine repairs.