HOW MUCH ??????
Not me but.....

A few years back i worked in London on various building sites as a sparks mate for a well known publically listed construction firm. Among the people i worked with one of them told me this tale of his little accident.

He had been working on a building refurbishment for a large london based multi national bank. What this meant was that 2 or 3 floors at a time were worked on while the rest of the building was occupied as normal and bank stuff got done.

Working in a utility room one day he was called away by his charge hand to have a look at a job on another part of the site as it was more urgent . So he went off and left his tools in the utility room while he got various bits from stores for the new task.

Upon returning to the utility room to pick up his tools he accidentally kicked the piece of diamond tread antiskid plate that was on the floor.
The problem was the plate was not attached to the floor and whoever had cut it had neglected to file off the sharp edge.
In front of the plate was an open door to the electrical riser complete with the main busbar for the whole building. In order to protect the busbar and for safety a cover is fitted made out of plastic not dissimilar to an icecream carton.

The inevitable happens when the sharp edges slice through the cover and short out the busbar. A huge bang , nasty smell in the air and lots of pretty blue sparks. The end result is that all the power is off in the building for the rest of the day.

The bank could never put an atcual figure on what it cost them to be out of buisness for the afternoon . They couldnt say what deals the dealers would have done or what currency trades they would of made and how that would have influenced the brokers.

Mercifully the construction firm had public liability insurance .
The end cost?

Insurance was paid out at the sum of 100 MILLION POUNDS an hour.

Thats right the insurance pay out was greater than some countries GDP. This happened over a decade ago as well , i would hate to think what a similar incident would cost today.

All this could have of been avoided with 2min with a file , about 50 pence worth of hardware and employing someone who was not as lazy or stupid.
(welgar, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 6:45, 1 reply)

100 Million?
There are some pretty big claims on here, but that's just ridiculous. Do the maths... even assuming a relatively short working day/year it would put that office building, on it's own, in first place in the Fortune listings, above Wal-Mart.
(Zegnar, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 14:06, closed)