{"id":6759,"date":"2015-09-30T20:59:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T19:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=6759"},"modified":"2015-10-04T21:41:34","modified_gmt":"2015-10-04T20:41:34","slug":"daily_369_-_electricity_cabinet_fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2015\/09\/30\/daily_369_-_electricity_cabinet_fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily: 369 – electricity cabinet fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are actually from yesterday. I was at home with both kids today (after two days at home with a coughing Adrian) and trying to get some actual work done as well, so photography got lower priority.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As I was eating my breakfast porridge, suddenly the power went out. Other parts of the house still seemed to have power. That wasn’t the first time: sometimes we lose power in the kitchen when we turn on too many kitchen appliances at the same time. But this time when I checked the circuit breakers they all looked OK, and so did the ground fault circuit breaker.<\/p>\n

I thought I’d go check with the neighbours. But when I stepped outside, I saw there was no point in talking to the neighbours. There was thick smoke coming out of the electricity cabinet at the corner of the street. Whoah!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I made my first-ever call to 112 which actually felt a bit cool. Less cool was that the fire department had no intention of getting here and doing anything about it. It’s electricity, so I should call the electricity firm, they said. And the electricity firm apparently didn’t really want to do anything about it either. <\/p>\n

The smell of an electrical fire spread throughout the neighbourhood and dog-walkers and other passers-by kept stopping, looking worriedly at the cabinet and taking out their phones. After a while I just stayed out there so I could tell them that I had called the appropriate authorities and was keeping an eye on it. Which was actually rather scary: while most of the time there was only smoke, occasionally small flames shot up and muffled bangs could be heard. (I actually brought out a fire extinguisher just in case it got worse.)<\/p>\n

Finally about 6 phone calls and 90 minutes later, a van arrived with two guys inside. They also wanted to call 112 and were mildly annoyed when I told them that I’d already tried that, and they were on their own. They cut the power to the cabinet and then poked it open, with a fire extinguisher at the ready. But when the cabinet door fell open, it was with a whisper and not a bang: everything flammable had effectively already burned. All we could see was a slightly larger poof of smoke, and a lot of carbonized equipment. It crumbled when they started tearing it out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After that initial wait, they were quite efficient. Soon more guys and vehicles arrived, and then an excavator and a dumper truck. They dug out the old cabinet and installed a new one. Adrian and I cycled off to buy pizza.<\/p>\n

Around 3 o’clock I went out to check what the status was. I found the last guy packing up his tools. Turns out they had forgotten to tell me the power had been restored a while already. (I didn’t notice because they’d told me to switch off the power entirely rather than rely on the partly-burnt supply.)<\/p>\n

On the whole I guess it could have been worse, but I was surprised by the slow response by both the fire department and the power network maintenance company, and their apparently relaxed attitude about an ongoing fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are actually from yesterday. I was at home with both kids today (after two days at home with a coughing Adrian) and trying to get some actual work done as well, so photography got lower priority. As I was eating my breakfast porridge, suddenly the power went out. Other parts of the house still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6759"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6761,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6759\/revisions\/6761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}