Courthouse wiring a concern

By Kay S. PedrottiDeep in the crawl space of the 1895 Pike County courthouse is a tangle of wiring that defies description. Phone cable, electric wires and other ‘lines’ ‘“ both active and disconnected ‘“ form a complex spider web above the dirt floor and the many sets of pipes for water, heating and air conditioning.Bill Shaver of Lighthouse Communications, who was working in the crawl space to fix telephone cable problems last week, says the building ‘was not designed for modern uses and needs a major upgrade.’ He says there are places where workers or installers must belly-crawl to get to the source of a problem, as he had to do while fixing Superior Court office phone lines. Through the years of his work in Pike, Shaver said he has encountered many places where short-cuts and ‘scotch locks’ were used to splice wires, when they probably should have been replaced.