Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Verizon vs. the Needham Fire Department

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the never-had-that-problem-before dept.

netbuzz writes "At issue is whether — or not — there was a minor fire in a house on Pine Grove Street in Needham, Mass., caused by a Verizon employee drilling through an electrical main. Everyone agrees that whatever happened — or didn't happen — was indeed the fault of the Verizon employee; it's "fire or no fire" that is at issue. Verizon says no fire, not even smoke. The Needham Fire Department begs to differ. New eye-witness reports are emerging ... and it's not looking good for Verizon."

2 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:wow by AskChopper · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yep.. Happens a lot. Last year I was with a team trying to find a water pipe that was leaking when their JCB dug right through an electrical cable in the water filled hole. The resulting fireball singed the eyebrows off one of the guys who was leaning over the hole to look in. It left a whole Business Park without electricity. The employees loved it because they all got sent home. The companies themselves were less than pleased though!

    --
    The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
  2. DirecTV Story by Se7enLC · · Score: 5, Interesting
    When I wanted to add a cable drop in my room, I opted to pay DirecTV to do the installation, thinking that they would bring a giant ladder and check to make sure that they ran the cable in an appropriate place. Things that I shouldn't be doing in a rental apartment. Oh no. Here's what they did:
    • They took my personally-owned coax cable and cut the end off it. (I had a 50ft cable running to the jack in the other room as a temporary solution).
    • Drilled a hole through the wall going outside without even pausing to consider what was in that wall
    • Dropped the cable down the side of the house
    • Realized it wasn't long enough and put a coupler on it and added another cable (don't they have SPOOLS OF CABLE on their truck?)
    • Drilled a hole through the frame of the basement window
    • Fed the cable haphazardly in to connect to the box.
    • Attached the cable to the wall by putting a staple THROUGH the cable, trying to take it back out of the cable, giving up, cutting off the excess, and using another staple to go around it.

    It was only a matter of time before one of these morons drilled through an electrical line.