Posted on 07/17/2017 2:01:31 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
(Newser) – The last message sent by 14-year-old Madison Coe before she was electrocuted in the bathtub shows the tragic mistake that killed her. "When you use and (sic) extension cord so you can plug your phone in while you're in the bath," the teen from Lovington, NM, wrote to a friend, sending a picture of the cord connection on top of a towel. But despite the precautions, Madison was apparently unaware that there was fraying on part of the cord, NBC 12 reports. Officials say she was killed after touching a frayed section while she was in the water. Investigators believe her phone was never immersed in the water.
According the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Lovington Police Department, the cord had been plugged into a non-grounded outlet with no circuit-interrupting safety mechanism, the New York Daily News reports. Family members released her final message to help raise awareness of the danger. Her father, firefighter and EMT Logan Coe, tells Inside Edition that Madison often took her phone into the bathroom to listen to music while she was in the tub. "Whenever I talked to Madison about it, she said, 'Dad, it's outside the tub,'" he says. A GoFundMe campaign to help the family has now raised more than $20,000.
After injecting a little levity into the previous post, I suppose I should say that I do feel sorry for the young girl who was careless with electricity and was electrocuted. She didn’t deserve a death sentence.
I’m trying to keep the empathy at a superficial level, though. If I can — and without images I usually can (if I don’t hear too many details about the person) — I don’t take these things to heart. Somewhere in the world they are happening every minute, maybe every second, and if we took them all to heart, we’d all be miserable all the time.
When you install the GFI outlet it will come with some stickers. They do not make 2 prong GFI Outlets. Since the new Outlet will now have a floating ground Pin(unhooked)- You need to put a sticker on the front of the new outlet cover. Use the sticker that says “No Equipment Ground”.
Your old Outlet might have more than two wires. It might have power coming in and power heading out to the next outlet or light in the circuit. Four screws on the outlet might be being used. You either have to connect all of them to the “Line” side of the GFI(Black to Black and White to White) or else you will use the “Load” side of the outlet to protect everything down stream as well. Connect the black wires to the smaller prong side of the outlet. And it will not work if you do not connect the incoming power to the line side to the GFI.(if you switch the line and load wire sets).
I believe that you can by code actually replace all downstream GFI protected outlets with regular 3 prong outlets. You just have to put that sticker on them.
Pretty cool.
Always better to be extra safe, with electricity.
The deceased's downfall was that she was well-grounded.
Otherwise, she would only have felt a strong tickle.
I know nothing about electricity, but when I redid my bathroom and put in a CFCI outlet, there was nothing to ground it to, as my house is 67 years old, so I had to poke a hole in my wall and ground it to a pipe.
The circuit would trip constantly without that grounding. Now it doesn’t, so I assume I did something right.
Thanks.
Thanks for the additional information about the connections (and I’ll use the sticker).
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