Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Check your electrical wiring!

This is topic Check your electrical wiring! in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 02-17-2002, 12:19 PM:

From the Saturday evening news report on WCAX TV in Vermont:

Maybe you can't cry FIRE in a crowded movie theater, but that's only if there's no fire. South Burlington firefighters were called to Cinema Nine off Shelburne Road this afternoon -- after a blaze broke out in the lobby. Everyone was evacuated without injury after an apparent short circuit at the concession counter. ((Susie Cain/Movie Patron: "The girl served me my popcorn and all of a sudden I looked and I said, 'Your popcorn machine's on fire!' And there was all kinds of fire coming up from under the popcorn maker. And then within two minutes whe whgole popcorn machine was on fire and within another two minutes the bags on top of the machine started catching on fire. By that time the girl was freaking out.... Next thing you know, there
was like total smoke .... I mean it was unbelievable, but I walked out with the popcorn.")) The customers also walked out with a raincheck to come back another day. For now, Cinema Nine is closed."

Closing for a Saturday can hurt!

Taking a wild guess, a cracked plastic hose from the oil pump could spray oil over electrical wiring. If the wiring was frayed or damaged, things could get hot.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-17-2002, 06:02 PM:

A friend of mine was asst. mgr. at Act III's West 11th Movieland 6 in Eugene back around 1990. He told me they had a fire in one of the popcorn makers at around 8PM on a Saturday night. The place was packed at the time. Alarms went off, fire & police responded, and staff was forced to evacuate all 6 auditoriums even though there was no danger to anyone by that time. Rainchecks were offered to everyone. Costly.

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-17-2002, 07:15 PM:

A popper caught fire here in Salt Lake City at Jordon Comons last year. It screwed up the day for everyone, more so for the patrons. Luckily it happened before opening but management had the audacity to hold everyone in line till the mess was mopped up(it was a way bigger job than that!). Then they let everyone in line in(including us) only to find that the film they came to see had already started, in my case, African Queen, it was even running in the wrong aspect ratio! I've haven't been back there again nor do I intend to go back.
All in all that incident was very poorly managed by some very poorly trained management!
Mark @ Home

Posted by Richard Fowler (Member # 893) on 02-18-2002, 12:45 AM:

Jordans.....reminds me of my old high school with a food court built in the middle..
Richard Fowler
TVP-Theatre & Video Products Inc. www.tvpmiami.com

Posted by Mathew Molloy (Member # 666) on 02-18-2002, 04:00 AM:

Speaking of checking the wiring...

We're taking over a Mann Theatre here and last week we were hanging some aluminum flex and bumped a light socket. Sparks flew everywhere, burnt a hole in the socket, etc. We found out the fixture had been wired in reverse with the outside ring being hot!

I can only assume it's the same people who bypassed all the failsafes on the Norelco AAII and the Xetron lamphouse. I'll hazard a bet it's the same who wired the speakers up with no less than three types of wire to make it to the booth.

Posted by Don Sneed (Member # 955) on 02-18-2002, 04:20 AM:

I once worked as a projectionist at a theatre in Galveston Texas when someone called in a bomb threat back in 1980....at the dumpster police found a small case, after x-rays of the case, police found wires...the three screen cinema was evacuated with packed houses...after two hours, the case was a abandon 8mm movie projector !!

Posted by Owen Shave (Member # 1156) on 02-18-2002, 08:48 AM:

There is a Safety video that goes around the UCI cinemas here in the UK of a fire at the East Kilbride UCI. I've never seen it but apparently the popcorn machine goes up in flames and the CCTV catches the Concessionists serving for about 5 minutes afterwards with the flames licking at their heels! now i'm dedicated to increasing the revenue per head, but come on!
also two weeks ago some kind patrons of ours decided to set fire to some seats with liquid propellant. Luckily one of the ushers had a decent bit of common and was able to extinguish it with the in-screen fire extinguisher. Pull-aim-squeeze-sweep training is *sooo* valuable. A special thanks go out to the fire brigade who turn up afterwards, hack the seats apart with an axe to check it is completely extinguished and leave. I was reminded of the scene in Ghostbusters when they destroy the ballroom in that hotel just to get Slimer.
Its going to be an interesting health and safety committee meeting this month, I can tell...

Posted by Sean McKinnon (Member # 612) on 02-19-2002, 02:54 AM:

I had a Strong Switching power supply go up in flames on me at one theatre because the techs did not tighten the wiring properly. Also had to evacuate my 20 opening night of LOTR becuase the fire alarms went off. It amazes me how poeple dont understand the importance of getting out when the alarms go off. I show a video at my theatre of a soccer (football) stadium in england that caught on fire, scary stuff.

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--Sean McKinnon
Manager
Loews Cineplex Entertainment
Liberty Tree Mall 20
Danvers, Mass
www.enjoytheshow.com

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 02-19-2002, 09:45 AM:

How many more would have survived the WTC disaster if everyone able had immediately started to evacuate and get well clear of danger after the first tower was hit? I recall some news reports said people in the second tower were being told to stay at their desks, since their tower was "safe".

Last summer my family stood outside a Boston hotel at 3:00 am after a false alarm. Less than half the people in the hotel took the alarm seriously enough to evacuate, many looking out the windows at the "fools" standing in the parking lot in their robes as the alarms blared and fire trucks drove up. Now I know we did the right thing.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 585-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 585-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 02-19-2002, 04:45 PM:

I had a weird thing happen. I was wiring remote control panels that required me to walk back and forth between two booths, using an auditourium as a shortcut. I went through that auditourium 5-6 times over the course of about 3 hours. The 6th time I went through, one of the seats were on fire, and the two on each side were half engulfed.

I'm sure there was no one else in the building, so I can only surmise someone had left a cigarette in the seat where it smoldered for hours until flaming up.

It also turn out that the flame-retardant stuff they apply to seats had worn off. We didn't know that these seats must be treated once every few years (they are Haywood-Wakefields.)

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 02-20-2002, 11:07 PM:

Over the years, we lost two popcorn machines due to fires. None of those were electrical fires. They were oil fires due to improper operating procedures.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 11-02-2003, 05:44 PM:

Cinemark Movies 12 in Springfield OR had a popcorn machine go up in flames today, around 1PM. I happened to arrive just after they had put out the flames. The popcorn machine looked like a total loss, and everything within about 15 feet of the popper was a mess -- there was white CO2 powder everywhere. (Or whatever is in a typical fire extinguisher). The worst part was the odor -- it smelled awful anywhere in the mall within 50 yards of the theatre lobby. All 12 shows had to be evacuated and passes were being handed out. Oddly, it took the fire dept. a LONG time to respond...

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 11-02-2003, 09:18 PM:

It's interesting that this topic got bumped to the top today. Around 10:30 this morning, I heard fire trucks going down my street. About 6 houses down, I saw a lot of smoke. I walked down and saw lots of smoke coming out of the roof of that house. It took the fire department 30 to 40 minutes to get the fire out and it burned about a 4-foot diameter hole in the roof. Usually, house fires that do significant damage make the news here. None of the 3 TV stations had a story about it on their web sites. Of course, this was on a Sunday, so most TV stations aren't in news-seeking modes on the weekend.

Lots of the houses in my neighborhood were built in the early 1960s. Mine was built in 1962 and when we've done wiring work, we've found hideously bad wiring work left behind by people that did a half-assed job, took the money and ran. I wonder how many house fires are caused by bad wiring that people have no idea is there.

Do companies that do commercial wiring, such as for theatres, typically do shoody work in a hurry?

Evans

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 11-02-2003, 09:48 PM:

Isn't the 1960's the era when lots of aluminum wiring was being used for residential wiring? Unless you used the proper AL-CU connectors and anti-corrosion paste, the oxide formed would eventually cause enough resistance to heat the connection, resulting in eventual failure or fire. [Eek!]

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 11-03-2003, 12:57 AM:

A co-worker about 15 years ago bought a house built with early aluminum wire and fittings. He retightened all the fittings etc. twice a year for several years until he found one that had gotten hot enough to melt a little. He turned the power off and lived in a motel until a contractor pulled it all out and replaced it with copper.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-03-2003, 01:28 AM:

quote:
Last summer my family stood outside a Boston hotel at 3:00 am after a false alarm. Less than half the people in the hotel took the alarm seriously enough to evacuate, many looking out the windows at the "fools" standing in the parking lot in their robes as the alarms blared and fire trucks drove up. Now I know we did the right thing.

This raises what is, IMHO, a very important point: badly designed and/or installed fire alarm systems repeatedly setting off false alarms. What tends to happen is that over time, employees/patrons/residents of a building will gradually take it less seriously - a sort of electronic 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome. Then when there really is a fire, people won't evacuate.

This became a real problem in one newly-opened cinema I worked at. There were two issues with the fire alarm: firstly, all the dust from the building work was repeatedly triggering the photoelectric heads, and the rate-of-rise heat detectors were set at far too high a sensitivity rating, and they too would trigger false alarms. At one stage it was going off one or twice a week, and always a false alarm. Regular customers didn't like it either, and things got to the stage at which they were writing complaint letters and demanding refunds.

The fire alarm contractors were singularly useless and it took six months of mieowing and hissing at them before they finally managed to get the system reasonably stable. I'm convinced that if there had been a real fire during that period, there would have been a real risk of injury or worse because by that stage no-one was treating the alarm seriously.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 11-03-2003, 10:42 AM:

One thing I forgot to mention about that popcorn fire is the fire alarm had triggered in the theatre lobby, and it seemed that nobody at the theatre or the mall could shut it off (by design maybe?). It was one of those high-frequency ear-piercing alarms. Presumably the alarms also went off in the auditoriums. When I got there, the fire was already completely extinguished, but it took the Fire Dept. a good 15 more mins. before they arrived, and another 10 mins. to shut off the shrieking alarm.

Posted by Mark Hajducki (Member # 1732) on 11-03-2003, 11:07 AM:

quote:
This became a real problem in one newly-opened cinema I worked at. There were two issues with the fire alarm: firstly, all the dust from the building work was repeatedly triggering the photoelectric heads, and the rate-of-rise heat detectors were set at far too high a sensitivity rating, and they too would trigger false alarms. At one stage it was going off one or twice a week, and always a false alarm. Regular customers didn't like it either, and things got to the stage at which they were writing complaint letters and demanding refunds.

What is worse is having a newly opened cinema in a not fully opened mall where there is still building work going on. (That plus a multi-story carpark where the local neds find it fun to smash the break glass alarm points). At least we have a phased alarm system that allows us to avoid evacuating the screens until the fire/incident is confirmed.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-04-2003, 01:48 AM:

quote:
What is worse is having a newly opened cinema in a not fully opened mall where there is still building work going on.

Or even worse still, having an alarm system which is interlinked with others that are under the control of morons. Some of our false alarms at the place I mentioned above happened because there was a bar and a restaurant unit in the same building as the cinema, and the fire officer demanded that all three alarm systems would be interlinked, i.e. any fire signal on one would set off the other two. At the time the bar was managfed by someone who was as thick as two short planks: she neither knew nor cared how her system worked, even at the basic level of checking an activated head and then resetting. And the restaurant unit had a poncy, authentic wood-burning pizza oven, which as you can imagine was a class A pain in the bum.

I've come across 'ned' in a John Buchan novel from the '30s (one of the characters was from the Gorbals area of Glasgow), so Oxford is clearly a bit behind the times!

The best we can do down here is the 'Donnie lass' - i.e. hard-living, hard-drinking hell-raising females from Doncaster, who are often to be seen in the pubs of York and Leeds on a weekend evening. Can't find any of 'em on the net, though: probably just as well!

Posted by Mark Hajducki (Member # 1732) on 11-04-2003, 06:55 AM:

quote:
I've come across 'ned' in a John Buchan novel from the '30s (one of the characters was from the Gorbals area of Glasgow), so Oxford is clearly a bit behind the times!

Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of ned from 1910, however it does not give (what is thought to be) the meaning of non educated delinquent.

There has been long debates as to whether ned is an acceptable term for use in the Scottish Parliment (well they have to do something there)