PECO power line Blows up on a house!!

Here is an unusual situation where PECO ran their power cables across the side of a home in West Philadelphia. PECO has Power Line in the front and Back of this house. This homeowner happens to own the unlucky home where PECO runs power to the rear Power Lines. This is not the way home are normally supplied with power.

The wire PECO used was SE cable. As you can see the cable failed. Judging by the burn marks on the wall it failed in an explosive fiery way. The cable destroyed the down spout, the communication cables (Phone and TV), 4 outside Air condition direct lines and the electrical service riser.

Now the home owner will need to have that all replaced. The service cable attaches to a two gang meter socket that will also need to be replaced. Due to the age of the meter it will most likely suffer too much damage when the service cable is removed. It cannot be taken apart and still be expected to work as well as it did before this damage. We cannot guarantee equipment of this age after it has been disturbed.

To remove this meter socket we will have to add new disconnects to bring the service up to current code. The service did not have a disconnect on it. Once something is broken it needs to be repaired to code.

For some reason the PECO foreman told the home owner that they would get into trouble for not having the correct disconnect and left the home owner upset about this. It turns out that they purchased the house this way and had no idea there was a problem. That is not a great example of customer service for a client who just had an electrical fire outside their window

PECO is normally a very good utility provider and I'm sure that they you do a good job at getting this straightened out. You can see PECO temporarily splice of the damaged cable. I believe that PECO should Re-feed the back TRY-Plex off the street and not across a private house. I would be a very unhappy homeowner if a utility ran a power line across my home. There is no way I would be happy keeping a power line that fed the block on my home after it blow up in the middle of the night. Not only is it scary it is just ugly.

When I was there I found live power lines left sticking out of the side of the home. I went down to the basement and cut off the power to these lines for the homeowner. All this homeowner need was for some kind to come by and look at the damage from the blown up power line and then get shocked off of the live power lines left after the original damage.

I will keep everyone posted on how this turns out.

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