Hot mess: Hanoi's electrical wiring shocks engineering world

By VnExpress   December 5, 2016 | 02:12 am PT
A spaghetti street installation in the city took 3rd place among the most dangerous examples of wiring.

Remember the messy bunches of wiring you’ve got caught up in, possibly more than once, on the streets of Hanoi?

Professional engineers have recently named the city's wiring among the worst in the world.

Members of the U.K.-based Institution of Engineering and Technology, one of the world’s largest engineering institutions, have named Hanoi as the third most dangerous place for wiring on the planet, after cities in India and the Maldives.

Engineering and Technology, the institution’s award-winning magazine, surveyed 38,000 engineers to compile the worst and most dangerous examples of electrical wiring around the world.

More than 500 examples were submitted and readers were asked to vote for installations that veer the farthest away from safe and sensible standards.

An office block in Madras in eastern India was named the worst installation after receiving more than 50 percent of the votes, while second place went to a hotel in the Maldives.

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This picture taken in Hanoi has caught the attention of many professional engineers around the world. Photo courtesy of Engineering and Technology

A street installation in Hanoi took third place. It is a collection of telecom, lighting and possibly mains cables, and according to E&T, it is “impossible” to tell the exact details as all of the cables are black.

“Fingers crossed for customers asking for support with wiring emergencies!” it said.

Nearly 60 percent of all fires and explosions that occurred in the country in the first six months of this year started from electrical problems, said the Ministry of Public Security.

On November 1, a massive fire from a billboard short circuit killed 13 people in Hanoi.

E&T’s readers found that unsafe wiring is not just a problem in Asia. Two of the top 12 examples of dangerous wiring are in France.

In 2013, Bill Gates surprised many around the world when he shared a photo of a utility pole with messy wiring in Vietnam on Facebook.

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