A Near-Miss Disaster: How a Faulty Fuse Box Almost Turned Our Home Into a Bonfire

This has been a very interesting past week, to say the least. Why? Well, we were extremely close to a catastrophic house fire.

It started late Monday afternoon when the missus’s daughter was going down to the basement to transfer her laundry to the dryer. Not long after she went down, she came back up and said, “Something is sparking out of the fuse box.”

In an instant, I got up and requested she go down with me to show me what she saw. Once we were in front of the fuse box, I could see what she was talking about. It wasn’t the fuse box, but the grounding clamp that was attached to the main incoming water line. The clamp was glowing red and arcing, which was on the verge of igniting the wood floor joist the grounding clamp was attached to. Without a thought, I dialed 911 and told them precisely what was taking place and requested instructions. The 911 operator sent the local fire department, which took less than 90 seconds to get here.

Upon seeing the fire trucks pull up, I flagged the firefighters into the house and guided them downstairs to the basement to show them the precise location where the arcing was taking place. They were as dumbfounded as I was and immediately pulled out an apparatus that could detect the presence of electricity on the pipe; sure enough, the pipe was electrified. At that moment, the fire department recommended that we get out of the house and not go back in, as it is highly possible that someone could get electrocuted due to the water line being electrified. Since we didn’t want to be in the scorching hot sun, we sat and waited on the front porch.

After a short while, a power company utility truck showed up and took a close look at the same spot in the basement. Both the deputy fire chief and the power company technician agreed that the power to the house must be terminated immediately. The deputy fire chief literally told us that if it were not for the missus’s daughter going down to the basement to do her laundry, he was almost certain this house would have been engulfed in flames by the time the evening came. Ultimately, the power company technician pulled the power meter from the house, which cut our home’s electric power. Since it was in the mid-90s even in the late afternoon, we were told we should leave the house and not come back, and check into a hotel for the time being until repairs are made as the ongoing high temperatures made staying in the house dangerous.

We were briefly allowed back into the house to pack what we could take in a couple of small travel bags, and again told not to come back due to the aforementioned hot temperatures. While we were hastily packing, one of the leasing office’s maintenance personnel, whom we will refer to as “Keith,” called on the missus’ phone and profusely apologized, repeatedly assuring us that he would personally take care of this situation first thing the next morning, complete with an electrician on the premises between the hours of 8 and 10 AM.

Since it was getting late and we were all a bit on the disoriented side from being bombarded with this horrific news, I called my Mom and asked if the missus and I could spend the night with her so we could determine a course of action to take with the leasing office.

By the time we arrived at my Mom’s house, we were both exhausted. We stayed up for a short while to chat with my Mom and fill her in with what we knew thus far, then we retired to bed around 9:45 p.m. Needless to say, I slept well that night into the morning.

The next morning, we hadn’t heard anything from the leasing office regarding last night’s events. Since my Mom lives in a very rural area, I had to take the car up the road so I could get a somewhat usable cell phone signal to call the leasing office to find out what’s going on.

No maintenance people came to our house in the morning, including no electrician. In fact, the head of maintenance knew nothing about this, but assured me that “something would be done today.” He apologized and kept assuring me that they would get to the bottom of this today and that he’d go to the house in the morning to assess the situation.

Over four hours later, the missus and I left my Mom’s house and set off toward home. When we got back to civilization (a.k.a. a strong, reliable cell signal), I called the leasing office and was connected once again to the head of maintenance. For the past four hours, nothing was done. No electrician. No nothing. At this point, I was a bit “miffed” considering we were told the night before that this would be addressed first thing in the morning along with an electrician to be dispatched to the house as we were told by Keith. I told the head of maintenance guy (who is named Steve) all of this, and he started to make excuses that he was busy and he “has thousands of other tenants to deal with,” and he will “get this taken care of as soon as possible.”  I found this extremely unacceptable as I then asked him “what have you been doing the last four hours” and that is when he started to speak in gibberish, not making any sense, while attempting to portray my inquiry as hostile.

At this point, my blood pressure was ready to explode all over the car’s interior; and this is when the missus took over in an attempt to talk some sense to Steve. She calmly kept repeating herself over and over to provide him with the information he claimed he needed (but was already repeatedly given prior).  Steve just kept ignoring when she spoke and rudely talking over her, while continuing to make excuse after excuse as to why he wasn’t making any progress.  Steve wouldn’t give either of us an ETA as to when work would begin so we could then plan our lives accordingly.  He kept accusing us both of denying anything he’d offer to us.  All we wanted was some sort of timeline to go by, and he continuously refused to provide any information that we requested.

We drove straight to the leasing office, walked into the door, and immediately asked for the property manager. He seemed rather surprised to see us there and he admitted that he knew very little about the events from the night before. The missus calmly explained to him precisely what had taken place thus far with both Keith and Steve and alluded to the completely despondent attitude from both. 

After gathering the details, the property manager, whose name is “Greg,” offered to put us up in a hotel at the leasing office’s expense. OK, great. He then set limits as to what he was willing to spend on a hotel stay for us, but I have to give credit to the missus; she stood her ground and we ended up getting what we wanted in the long run as far as a hotel stay is concerned. Greg’s boss then supposedly got involved. Oddly enough, Steve ended up leaving the office right after a phone call with both Greg and Greg’s boss, claiming he was going to our home to take pictures of the fuse box to see what he needed to order.

By the time Wednesday came, we were told a certified electrician would be dispatched to our home to replace the fuse box with a modern circuit breaker panel in the late afternoon/early evening. Later that night, we did drive by and see that there were electricians on the premises.

Before I go on, isn’t it amazing that somehow, significant progress was all of a sudden being made, especially since the leasing office was now footing the bill for our hotel stay? But, I digress.

By the time Thursday morning came, we were told that the new circuit panel was installed and that it was waiting for final inspection to certify the work that was done to make sure it’s all safe and up to current code safety specifications; then the power could be restored via a pre-arranged time with the power company.

Come Thursday evening, the missus ended up reporting a power outage at our house via the smartphone app to see if this would get things moving along with power restoration, and it worked. While the request she opened was closed, she did receive a return call complete with detailed information as to what needs to take place to get electric power restored to our home. She was told that another third-party inspection would need to take place and thusly be filed with the power company so they could be assured that it’s safe to restore power.

We ended up staying at the hotel Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, through this Friday morning. Oh yeah, on top of all of this, we had to contact the leasing office ourselves about a half hour to fifteen minutes before the hotel’s allotted check-out time to find if they would pay for another night’s stay at the hotel since we’ve not gotten any ETA that we could go back home. It was only until the last minute we were told we’d have to spend another night at the hotel.

Then, it was nothing more from the leasing office, and I mean that in the literal sense.

Come Friday morning, the missus’ phone rings via a technician from the power company; he’s literally outside our home wondering who is available to assist him with restoring power. Apparently, an inspection took place at some point after the breaker panel was installed, and it passed safety inspection with the paperwork sent to the power company overnight. Ummm, okay. She asked the power company technician to hang tight and informed him we were right up the road in a hotel and we’d be down in less than 10 minutes. He agreed to wait for us. 

We hurriedly put on our clothes, got in the car, and drove down from the hotel and met him outside our home. The power company technician had already reinstalled the power meter, but since no one was available to flip the main power breaker switch in the house, he wouldn’t know if power would be properly restored. Well, yours truly went in the house, down to the basement, and flipped the main power. Nothing. Ugh! 

Well, as it turns out, the electricians who installed the new circuit breaker panel had also fitted an outside main power switch in a weather-resistant box directly adjacent to the electric meter. Once he got the panel open, he flipped the switch, and like magic, the front porch light came on. I went back into the house and down to the basement to look for any potential issues. All was quiet, and all was well.

I slowly powered on the other breakers and went back upstairs to power on the air conditioners. So far, so good! Since the house was sweltering hot, we went back to the hotel to partake in the hotel’s free breakfast and to hang out before check-out time to allow our hotter-than-the-depths-of-hell house to cool down from the week’s lack of air conditioning.

We finally checked out of the hotel and came back home to toss the rest of the contents of the refrigerator into the garbage. I pulled the shelves and drawers from the refrigerator and thoroughly washed and dried them all and reinstalled them back to their original locations. Sweat was dripping from my forehead down my cheeks and down my neck. I ended up taking a cold shower while the missus finished cleaning the refrigerator door shelves and wiping out the freezer section. 

We ordered essentials for the refrigerator and freezer, which all arrived several hours later. So far, all is well at home, and we are back to our normal lives after this wretched experience thanks to our illustrious real estate office.

And finally, and here’s the real kicker: We never got a single phone call or any kind of message from the leasing office that our home was ready for us to come back to. Not a peep. We only found out through the power company technician who called us early Friday morning that the safety inspection was complete and had passed. Even as I type this at 9:33 PM on Friday evening, we still haven’t gotten a call back from the real estate office. It’s now Saturday early evening at nearly 5:00 PM and still … not a single word.

Absolutely unreal.