The first five minutes of an electrical emergency

Electrical emergencies are unusual in that the most useful actions are nearly all things not to do. There is no equipment to fetch and nothing to take apart. What matters is isolating the problem, keeping people away from it, and giving whoever is coming out accurate information.

Know where the panel is before you need it

This is worth doing on an ordinary afternoon. Find the panel, make sure you can get to it without moving furniture, make sure there is a torch nearby that works, and make sure more than one person in the house or the business knows both of those things. Looking for a panel by phone light during an actual emergency is a bad first experience of it.

What to switch off, and in what order

• If you know which circuit is involved, switch that breaker off and leave it off. Do not reset it to see what happens.
• If you do not know, and something is arcing, smoking or burning, switch off the main and deal with the dark. Light is a smaller problem than fire.
• If water is involved, in a flooded room, a leak into a fitting, or a pool light, isolate before anyone goes near it, not after.
• Once it is off, tell everyone it is off and why, so nobody helpfully turns it back on.

What not to touch

Do not touch anyone who is in contact with a live source, because you become the second casualty. Isolate the supply first if you possibly can. Do not open a panel cover. Do not pull on a damaged cable to move it out of the way. Do not put water on an electrical fire. And do not stand in water and reach for a switch, which sounds obvious written down and is exactly what people do in the moment.

Telling an emergency from a repair

Not everything that goes wrong at ten at night has to be dealt with at ten at night, and knowing the difference saves everybody trouble. Treat these as genuine emergencies:

• Any smell of burning, any smoke, any scorch mark on an outlet, switch or panel.
• Buzzing, crackling or visible arcing, particularly at the panel.
• Anything electrical that is hot to the touch, including a breaker.
• Water reaching wiring, fittings or the panel.
• A partial outage where some circuits are dead and others behave oddly, which can indicate a supply fault rather than a household one.
• Anyone who has had a shock, however brief and however fine they say they feel.

A single dead outlet, one light that has stopped working, or a breaker that tripped once and has held ever since will keep until the morning. It is entirely reasonable to leave it off and call during office hours.

What to say when you call

The useful details are short: what happened and when, what you have already switched off, whether there is any smell or heat, whether water is involved, whether the whole property or one area is affected, and whether the neighbours also have a problem, which distinguishes a supply issue from yours. Say the address plainly and say whether anyone was hurt first.

Afterwards

When a circuit has faulted badly enough to make a mark, getting the power back on is the middle of the job, not the end of it. The thing worth understanding afterwards is why it happened, because a fault at one outlet in a house that has been extended over decades is often about the circuit rather than the outlet.

It is also worth leaving the affected circuit off until it has been looked at, even once everything appears calm again. A fault that has produced heat once has usually left the conditions that produced it, and an outlet that works when tested is not the same as an outlet that is sound. Photograph anything scorched before it gets cleaned up or replaced, because that mark is evidence about what happened and it is the first thing worth seeing.

Triangle Electric Company answers emergency calls 24 hours a day on (806) 376-9950, holds Texas Electrical Contractor licence TECL# 18914, and has been doing this in Amarillo since 1926. If you are weighing up whether it counts as an emergency, call and describe it. That is a fair question to ask.