Advice needed re: burnt 60A breaker

[Jazzye]

Hi, I'm really sorry if I've joined and asked the wrong forum for this question, but really need advice...

I live in a developing country (Myanmar) and have issues understanding the electrics here... might be a situation of knowing a little, but but not understanding...

I live in an appartment building which is less than a year old. Recently we have been loosing all electricity, while the rest of the building still has it ( power cuts, brown outs, and flickering electricity is a regular thing here)... we finally got an electrician to come round today while I was at work, and only my partners mother was here to speak to him.

I've come home and apparently it's fixed, and a breaker was the issue. I don't know where it's from, it's not from inside the appartment, nor downstairs where all the breakers for all the apartments are... but they've left the broken breaker on my table... it looks like it's been on fire... can anyone shine any light onto what could cause this damage, and if it's dangerous.... we are one of 20 apartments in the building, and if this could happen to ours, could it happen to others?

I attach pictures of the breaker....

Cheers

Elliott

 

[snowhead]

That is most likely the main switch, just for your appartment, so would probably have been downstairs.
The cable that was on the burnt terminal was most likely not fully tightened when installed.
Over the last year it has got hot to the point the contact between the cable and terminal has failed.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

Yes, a likely cause was simply that the terminal had not been fully tightened, for which the flickering was the first indication. It is a runaway situation in which the heat generated by the high resistance of the connection makes it go higher in resistance. While the result can be a very hot connection, heavy electrical components are made of materials with relatively low fire risk, e.g. self-extinguishing plastics, so the likelihood of the heat starting a real fire is small. It would be prudent to get all the connections in the relevant panelboard checked though.

There is also a possibility that the heat was the result of poor contact within the breaker. I would have to do a full forensic inspection of the breaker internals to decide whether that was the case.

 

[Jazzye]

Thanks for the replies guys, you've made me feel a lot better... the electrician who did the whole building is out of town on another project, but he's going to be back next week, and he's going to check everything...

So, it sounds like just a poor connection on just this one terminal... that's fine.... I was just worried that it was a defective breaker, as that might be indicative of a batch of faulty ones...

Cheers!