Beginning of a Fire - Part 4

By: Nick Markowitz Jr.
Fire Investigator – Electrical Contractor

T he following pictures are from an office building I have had as a fire alarm client for a long time. I was stripping out the old abandoned telephone and data wiring as required by National Electrical Codes when i came across this particular very dangerous wiring condition.

Apparently when the building was being added onto, the electrical contractor at the time spliced together these 2 wires without proper connectors or a junction box. As you can see one of the connections has completely burned up and was about to fail. The reason is that copper and aluminum were put together without a proper seperating connector. The disimilar metals effect corroded the wiring. Additonally the ground wire on the aluminum wire was not properly grounded to the AC cable casing and there was no safety ground in effect.

Had the workers doing the remodeling been in the ceiling ahead of me they could have been seriously injured when the bare wire made contact with the metal grid. Luckily I found the condition first, got the power turned off, and put a proper junction box in and splice connectors to insure proper electrical function. Had the connection failed it could have touched the metal grid and caused an arc explosion or more dangerously been waiting in the ceiling to shock the electricain who was attempting to figure out why the power had gone out.

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