Fire Safety & Electrical Insights: What Every El Paso County Homeowner Should Know
Fire is a hot topic lately especially locally. On Facebook there is a page we recommend called, What's on Fire? El Paso County Area.
Recently, I was able to visit with the fire chief in Falcon and enjoyed sharing about what we are up to in our area as well as learning about what they are seeing in our part of the county.
One of the topics of discussion was that we recently have been added to the list of contractors at Mt. View Electric, our local electrical utility, who can locate and repair underground faulted cables. According to Mt. View during the soon and upcoming wet season they can get an average of 5 faulted service cables a week. Other electrical contractors charge double what we will be charging for such a service. Part of that has to do with, I suppose, the travel time out to the eastern plains and back to the Springs.
When I am able to visit with our local fire fighters the question we want the answer to is, "What are you seeing in regards to electrocutions and electrical fire?".
Because we install so many gfi's, that reduced electrocutions when released back in the late 70's, early 80's (reduced reported US electrocutions by 800/year) we wonder if they are still doing there job. The answer is yes! Jeff said that they aren't seeing electrocution calls.
What they are seeing is, not electrical fires, but fires started by folks putting out their cigarettes in their potted plants near their homes and much later they are blown back into flame and onto the side of or under the house.
We have responded to post house fire calls, but that's a story for another day. We don't want anything like what we saw with the Hamen fire, Waldo Canyon fire, or Black Forest Fire. Be careful out there, neighbors:)
