Electrical Safety Inspection

Tuesday 27 Jan 2009
2130

It’s a long-standing fact of life in the Army that there’s always somebody who “doesn’t get the word”. Yesterday a couple of those somebodies made some of our lives a little more difficult.

I went back to my room last night after work and switched on the light, and nothing happened. I thought “darn, a burned-out bulb, and I just used the last one”. I don’t like the fluorescent lights in these rooms, so I have a couple of incandescent lamps that I plug into the switched outlets and use as my main light source. I turned on the fluorescent light so I could see, and went to turn on the desk lamp. Nothing there, either. At first I thought “Wow, two burned out bulbs? – maybe a breaker tripped”, but then I looked under the desk and noticed that all my plugs were laying around loose – my power strip was gone.

That’s when I noticed that the power strip was gone from the light by the door, too. I immediately knew what had happened – an electrical safety inspection. We’ve been talking about them for a long time, and planning to confiscate all unsafe power strips and adapters, as well as other prohibited items.

Electrical safety is a big deal over here. A number of people in the AOR have died from electrocution, and there have been some electrical fires as well. So we are very serious about construction and maintenance standards, and also about the safety of electrical appliances. Among other requirements, everything must be either UL or CE listed. (CE is the European counterpart to UL). Anything electrical that does not have a CE or UL marking on it is contraband, and is subject to immediate confiscation.

In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t think of this when I wrote the “What To Bring With You” entry a couple weeks ago. I’m going back to edit it to include this information. No sense bringing things that will be confiscated….

So I understood what had happened, but there were two problems. One was that my power strips were both CE marked. I made a special point of this for myself, because it wouldn’t do for someone who works in DPW to have non-compliant electrical items! The other problem was that there was no note or other indication of what had happened – the power strips were just gone, and I was left in the dark. This was not a very customer-friendly approach, and I felt violated even though I knew what was behind it. I can imagine how the other people felt.

We had had several DPW meetings in which we talked about this very issue, and while we decided that we did need to go through rooms and inspect/confiscate these items, we made it very clear that we would announce the inspections, and leave some kind of a note behind telling why items were confiscated. There was also supposed to be an amnesty period to allow people to get CE-compliant replacement items. Many of the now-contraband items were actually sold through the PX or issued by SSSC before we got the CE/UL policy in place, so we’ve been on a public education campaign to get people to understand what they have to have, and why.

We even have a purchase request in process from Housing to provide CE- approved power strips for each room in the barracks like they do in Kuwait. But the purchase has not yet been completed, and we were supposed to be taking a measured approach to this issue in the interim.

Somehow that word didn’t get down to the people who actually work day-to-day in housing. Their management failed to communicate the customer-friendly approach, and instead they went in very heavy-handed. Not only that, they weren’t even observant enough to read the clear “CE” markings on my power strips. I wonder how many other people’s CE-compliant items were improperly confiscated and destroyed? There’s no way to know, because they cut all the cords and threw them in the dumpster, and they had been taken away by the time any of us got back from work and started to complain.

Naturally I spoke to the housing office as soon as I discovered what had happened, and we put a stop to the practice after that first day. But in the interim, DPW got a bit of a black eye and I was treated to a reminder of how it feels to be at the receiving end of carelessly-implemented policies.

Mood: Disappointed
Music: Alanis Morissette – All I Really Want