Joseph (Joe) Nowikowski, P.E., IAAI-CFI, NAFI-CFEI, CVFI

Expert QuestionS & AnswerS

After 30 years in electrical systems, what’s a recurring finding in your investigations that most people in the industry don’t expect?

Failures are frequently the result of multiple factors that come together and not just a single event.

When mechanical or electrical systems are implicated in a loss, how do you determine whether the root cause lies in design, installation, maintenance, or operation?

That answer comes after all of the data is gathered and analyzed. Once that is done, I consider all the factors that came together to create the loss in order to determine how the issue began.

As someone who trains others in your discipline, what’s the most common mistake you see less experienced investigators make in mechanical and electrical failure investigation?

Newcomers tend to be in a hurry and are prone to pick the obvious answer. I try to get them to slow down, look a little longer and see what else they observe.

What’s the most interesting case you’ve worked on that you can talk about without revealing client details?

I investigated a fire in a petroleum processing plant. The fire was caused because a truck was run off the road by another vehicle. The truck struck a utility pole, the guy wire snapped and wrapped around the overhead power lines. That should activate the protection in the substation a few miles down the road. However, the substation was undergoing maintenance and the protection was bypassed. That caused a power loss/fire in the plant a few miles away because a safety system was in repair.

What do you wish more people understood about the work you do in mechanical and electrical engineering?

The answer to why is sometimes I don’t know. After a failure components can get consumed or even washed away by the fire fighters. I often tell people we have a 100-piece puzzle to build but only get 75 pieces. With that, we have to understand with the picture is. It is not always possible.

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