Glowing wire

[hillbilly1]

Had an interesting emergency call today, customer said there was a glowing hot wire between the garden center and a pole light. The fire department was worried it was going to burn through. I arrive at the store, manager has actual video (love it when they actually can show what happens) Sure enough, the video shows the wire glowing, and arcing running up and down it! Go out expecting to see a power cable, but its only a messenger wire that a temporary cable is attached to. During Christmas season they use it for the tree tent. Ok, I figure a ground fault, probably a broken conduit on the fence, and the store was old enough to not have a ground pulled in it, probably energizing the fence. Walked the fence didn't see any visual damage. Cut the cable loose, Re-energized the area. Nothing. Turned the pole lights on, all of the poles were 250 volts to earth! Ok, they had a severe lightning storm last night, probably burned the ground off somewhere, and a ballast was probably shorted. Turns out, someone had converted the pylon sign circuit to 120 volts, then robbed power off one leg of the pole lights, connected and re-phased the ground as a neutral! No ground at all in the home run! The only grounds were the ground rods in the pole bases. They were very lucky nobody got electrocuted! The rental equipment that was plugged into the recptacles was 250 volts to ground too!

 

[zbang]

That's a lot of work for the amount of stupid.

 

[hillbilly1]

The bad thing about it, was these parking lot poles were hot once before, when the store was built, about 20 years ago. The pylon sign wasn’t working, had 480 to ground at the disconnect. Found the ground wire for the pole lights were terminated to a single pole breaker back at the panel. Then some knucklehead screws it up again, looks to be a couple of years back!