A photo of the utility pole from which the crossarm broke off, and a close up of the decayed crossarm. (Credit: IBEW Local 614)
Yet another electrical fire sparked as a result of a downed electrical line Wednesday, continuing a concerning pattern of splintering equipment contributing to electrical fires.
Wednesday’s electrical fire in Southwest Philadelphia electrocuted one person, injured two children and displaced dozens of people, ranging from ages one to 70. The two children and one elderly woman were hospitalized.
It is the second fire in the last two months to involve a rotting wooden crossarm, following the house fire in Upper Chichester on May 5 that hospitalized two people, including a nine-month pregnant woman, and displaced one family.
IBEW Local 614, the union that represents over 1400 PECO workers, defined a crossarm as “an essential structural component of a power line, attached perpendicularly to the electrical pole to support high voltage wires.”
“Just like the electrocutions in Upper Chichester, this was preventable,” IBEW Local 614 president Larry Anastasi said.
“These incidents are part of a disturbing pattern we’ve been warning PECO management about for years. Local 614 workers have reported dozens of cases of decaying and rotten wood, leaning structures, and crossarms hanging on by a thread, in the hopes of avoiding this kind of disaster.”
The fire in Upper Chichester began after a power line detached from the pole and energized a home. In that case, the crossarm splintered. Wednesday’s fire was caused by mylar balloons hitting a trolley line. The decayed crossarm fully snapped and broke off.
“Five people, including two children, a pregnant woman, and a grandma in a wheelchair, have been hospitalized in the past month due to PECO neglect and mismanagement. It should be extremely disturbing to every customer that a live wire could fall on your house at any moment,” Anastasi said.
“As PECO continues to raise rates, it is clear that very little of that money is going toward guaranteeing basic levels of safety. Part of our job is to keep people safe, but PECO’s mismanagement is putting both workers and customers in danger.”
PECO released a statement to DelcoNow about Wednesday’s fire:
“Our thoughts are with those impacted by the incident that occurred in Southwest Philadelphia [Wednesday]. It is clear upon our investigation that this event was caused by multiple mylar (foil) balloons contacting aerial electric lines, which continues to be a cause of multiple outages each year. There is no indication that the condition of our equipment exacerbated the event. We regularly educate the public about the dangers of this situation and the potential impacts. In 2024 alone, there were 58 outages impacting more than 12,350 customers in our region that were caused by foil balloons. PECO has robust inspection and maintenance activities that follow industry standards, and the company has invested and continues to invest billions of dollars in reliability and system performance.
PECO says they maintain a “rigorous inspection and maintenance program” to ensure safety and reliability for their customers, including proactively investing more than $9.3 billion over the next five years to install new equipment and complete targeted enhancements and corrective maintenance across their electric and natural gas systems.
