#22 Gut Suspicion
I was tying in a standpipe to an existing fire sprinkler system a couple of weeks ago at work. The standpipe fed four hose valves going up the stairwell. If you don’t know anything about standpipes, there is usually a grooved cap at the top and bottom, held on with couplings to dead-end the pipe with hose valves on each landing for the fire department.
I was nervous already because the new pipe was not installed by me and I have trust issues with people in my field who I do not know personally. Something was bugging the heck out of me all day as I was combining the systems together. After fighting with the tie-in for almost 10 hours, I thought to myself “Something just doesn’t look right with this pipe.”
Sure enough, whoever installed the caps at the top and bottom put them on backward, which would have blown apart and coated the entire fourth-floor antique storage unit with dirty, black MIC water. The main valve was so far from the standpipe it would have taken at least five minutes for me to realize it. That simple mistake could have cost a lot of people their valuables.
Credit: aerro955