Water Shut Off Notice To Residents: Fill & Download for Free

It’s not as if Detroit one day shut off the water without notifying people that this was going to occur. Notices were sent out months in advance and offers were made to work with people on getting assistance to pay for the bill or set up payment plans. Many refused to acknowledge either option and the shutoff was the result.Detroit is in desperate financial straits. The residents know this and have for decades. Just like the city were they live, they hemmed and hawed and dawdled until the proverbial “bill” came due. Now they are complaining that what they knew was going to happen, did indeed, happen. The public “outrage” is more than a little bit disingenuous.Going forward, the residents and businesses of Detroit are going to have to make some hard choices: Remain in an area where they cannot afford to pay for basic services, or relocate. They really no longer have any alternatives.

I received a call about a job that was a unique situation a few years back. The sister of a man who was dying of cancer, said her brother was coming home from the hospital in a few days to die on hospice. He had owned four pure-bred wolves (close enough anyway to pure-bred) over the last 15 years. She informed me that his hardwood floors throughout the home were completely ruined from the dogs. I also noted there was a distinct smell of ammonia throughout the home from them pissing all over the place, marking their territories, as they were all males. There was hair everywhere also, and I mean everywhere! Her goal? Rip out the floors, replace them with laminate, cleaning it up for him, so he can come home to a nice environment to die in peace and cleanliness.We had to have it done in three days. Well. considering the cause, I pulled off the other jobs I had going, hired one more buddy of mine for the three days of work, along with my helper. The three of us pulled it together with just hour's notice before we needed to get started in order to make the deadline.Once we got there and started tearing out the floors, it was obvious that this needed more care than originally thought. The smell of ammonia started taking our breath away throughout the house; as we ripped board by board out, it was not bearable. My buddy told me he's not dying, I don't pay him enough to continue working. We all went outside and I told them to take a break, I'd be back in 20 minutes. I went and grabbed the best body suits and masks that money could buy at the local Menards. Then I bought 5 gallons of Killz2 odor sealant, latex water-based primer.We continued on, fighting through it, wearing our safety equipment and rolling primer as we went. In a few hours we were at the front door, all the hardwood ripped out, the floor primed and fresh air in our breaths. Due to the smell, we worked our butts off and actually got done quite quickly with the demolition and primer application. We then went home for the day to let the primer dry. All we could do was keep our fingers crossed, hoping the smell would be gone the next day when we got there.The stuff is amazing! We walked in at 5 a.m. the next morning and we could smell no ammonia what so ever. It was amazing! I couldn't believe it.There was a different smell however.Now that the ammonia smell was gone, we could clearly smell what seemed to be some hybrid marijuana coming from somewhere in the house. Not a bad smell, very tolerable, yet it was obvious there was marijuana being grown somewhere in the residence. After a couple hours my curiosity got the better of me. So at break, I took a walk upstairs, which was shut off from the rest of the house with a door at the bottom of the steps. Well imagine how powerful the smell was, seeing as a door, a 25-step stairwell, a hallway, another bed room door, a bedroom and a closet door had been separating us and five seven-foot-tall beautiful marijuana plants.Come to find out the cancer was so hard on the homeowner, he took it upon himself to grow illegal plants, as to help bear through the last year of his life. This was before the modern era of acceptable marijuana use in The States. In the state of Wisconsin it is still illegal right now, although that is going to be changing soon - it's looking like. The guy was the president of a bank his whole life. Not the type of man that would be partaking in illegal consumption of THC. Too much at risk with his job and his livelihood. His sister said, once he was turned on to the effects of the marijuana, it was the only thing that helped him pull through day after day.Of course I left the upstairs and went back to work as if nothing was going on. We completed the job on schedule, received a bonus along with thank you cards from the man and his family. It was well worth the effort in the end I've been told from the sister, as he was at peace in his final month alive. Apparently she was unaware he was growing anything.Since she took it upon herself to get this renovation done behind his back, she didn't know the danger that could have unfolded, inviting strangers into his house, doing what he was doing. There are plenty of people out there that would have been shallow-minded enough to call the authorities. Not my style. It will probably go down as one of the most memorable jobs I'll do, for the rest of my life. I do not even speak of the situation very often since then, out of respect for the family.Thanks for reading.

Two instances come to mind. I had to do a service call at this residence, they had lost the hot water. While fixing the problem I noticed the garage light did not go off when I opened the main breaker, I noticed that the feed for the garage was a romex 14–2 and it was running directly into the back of the meter box. While I had the meter pulled the inspector happened to show up, he was concerned about the meter, not only because of the unfused garage but inside it looked like the insulation on the feeders had burnt off. I got him to agree to wait and come back at the end of his shift to see if I was able to fix it because otherwise he was going to have the electricity shut off until it got fixed and this was a friday afternoon so it would have been off all weekend. I suspected that the tenants or owners would not be happy if they came home to no electricity, but I was able to get it fixed before the inspector came back that day.The other time was at a mobile home manufacturers. Another journeyman was helping me and he was up in the attic working, I heard him cussing every couple of minutes and I asked him what was wrong, he said he kept getting shocked on the neutrals but he had shut the main breaker off. While checking out the panel I found out that the neutral busbars were hot with 120 volts potential to ground but only with the main shut off. I found that there was no neutral ground bond in the panel so I put a bonding jumper in and that solved the problem.At that same plant that day I was troubleshooting a circuit in the breakroom and found that it was fed at two different points and had started a fire inside the wall but had luckily only scorched one of the second story floor joists, apparently, they had their mobile home electricians, (who are not licensed by the state), work on the plant electrical, which they are not supposed to do. The reason for the fire was that they had ran romex (NMB) through some aluminum flex (FMC), which is a code violation because of heat build-up.