was initially surprised to find out the reporter is English, from a middle class background in London and a lot younger than myself (and it wasn’t him who put the nail into the fuse carrier) but it is likely he attended a posh private school and they don’t even get a fraction of the safety checks that council funded schools are obliged to have; and since 1990s younger people often aren’t even taught the basics of electrical safety.
in 1989/90 me and a friend (then in year 12/13 or 6th form as we oldsters call that) got caught by this old Irish janitor for smoking in the far corners of a school field (as he had randomly decided to trim some shrubs/plants there).
My friend got put on plant watering duty in the 6th form block (on the last day of this he added 0,880 strength ammonia from the chemistry lab to the plant water and we blamed the results on “environment pollution”) – even worse we constructed a horrendously dangerous portable device which has absolutely no purpose other than to create a dead short circuit across a ring final circuit (with sufficient metal used so it did not go up on fire by itself) – thus popping the fuses/opening the circuit breakers.
We caused the entire set of GCSE language oral exams for that year to have to be retaken or allocated average marks; and had this janitor opening up every fuse cupboard in the building, blaming the 1970s era storage heaters for the random power cuts. Eventually he gave up altogether and called in the Southern Electricity Board – 3 large vans arrived with about 5 sparkies; 2 were middle aged and 3 others not much older than us.
Of course we acted totally innocent and asked the sparks what they had found; the older chaps said that the old school block had a TN-S supply but the new one was the notorious TN-CS (PME, combined earth/neutral) and there were multiple earth faults – this installation was so bad he had considered telling the Headmaster to evacuate the place whilst it was repaired (and that the janitor shouldn’t really have been poking around in the 3 phase distribution boards). He pointed out that “young electricians also still have to go to school when they start” – and decided to use this as a training exercise for the 3 lads on how to repair sections of an installation safely without having to put the entire site off supply (they did to be fair upgrade a lot of distribution boards and added RCDs etc which were not previously provided)
So we ended up making the school safer (just before they would have got a bigger bill for the work from the privatised SSE) and had likely also prevent the janitor getting himself sparked but I won’t even describe the exact construction of the device we built as in hindsight things could have ended up worse – the last kid I told about it (back in 1992 when I was still a lot more reckless) tried it in a smaller school and put even more of the place off supply, got himself arrested for criminal damage (they had the same area cops who were by then well aware of what me and my mates were capable of) and was very nearly expelled – it was lucky no one actually got hurt.
Today my work is to stop things like this happening or ensure that if there is an off supply vital systems remain running; and my friend is now a high school Physics teacher :laugh_at:
