Gratitude Monday: Health and safety

A couple of years ago I posted about being grateful for the fact that, in the United States, it’s considered a basic duty of the government (usually at the local level, but it goes up the line all the way to the EPA) to provide the citizenry with safe water, and that you mostly get it delivered to your kitchen and bathroom via pipes. You don’t have to go down to the creek with your buckets and schlep it back to your home; you turn the tap and there it is.

Well, yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine who runs an electrical business in England, and was reminded that there’s something else for which I’m grateful: at least in the six states where I’ve lived (even those south of the Mason-Dixon Line), building codes have meant that I’ve had relatively modern plumbing and wiring in my residences.

We were talking about his range of services—new construction as well as repairs and renovations, and I flashed onto my flat in Maidenhead, where there was mildew in the cupboards (closets to Americans), and they ran wires alongside pipes, along the floorboards, outside the walls.

(And, so you know, this was the least appalling place I looked at. Some of them were so stultifyingly awful, I actually gasped. And I've lived in a place where cockroaches were a daily occurrence, although I'm grateful that I only saw rats at a distance in the complex.)

But the worst, for me, was that when an electrician came in to do something about the ridiculous under-counter fridge (it was a plug-in, but stuck into a space with no room for the plug; I’m not making that up, he had to remove the plug and wire it into the wall to make it fit), he showed me the fuse box for the place.

As in—“here are some fuses, and here’s how you take this this wire to replace any fuse here that blows”. Not a circuit breaker, a fuse box. With wires.

Also—when I asked him if running wiring alongside pipes was allowed by building codes, he just laughed. It seems that in the UK, they don’t need no stinkin’ building codes. Or they didn’t up until the 21^st Century.

At which point, my friend tells me, they’re still not huge on enforcing them.

I’ve lived in some dodgy places over the years in the US, but never in a place that I thought might kill me. Or where I was expected to have electrician skills in addition to paying obscene amounts of rent. So I am really grateful that the swell county of Santa Clara has building codes, and enforces them.

And I know where the circuit breaker box is.