§1What this firm files
Presque Isle Power & Forensic Engineering, PC is a Pennsylvania professional corporation in its eighteenth year of practice, operating from a 4,200-square-foot bay at 2104 Pittsburgh Avenue on Erie’s industrial west side. The firm investigates electrical incidents — fires of suspected electrical origin, arc-flash injuries, sudden equipment damage events, motor and transformer failures, complaints about power quality from manufacturers whose product is leaving the line out of tolerance — and produces sealed PE reports, deposition testimony, and trial exhibits. We are retained by manufacturers, by their property and casualty insurers, by counsel on both sides of contested matters, and occasionally by municipal fire marshals when an investigation exceeds the time or instrumentation available locally.
The Lake Erie industrial corridor between Buffalo and Cleveland has the densest pre-1965 industrial infrastructure in the country per capita, with a working population that includes a tube mill in Erie, a forging plant in Meadville, machine shops along Pittsburgh Avenue and West 8th Street, the GAF Materials plant in Millcreek Township, the Lord Corporation campus on West 12th, and the working harbor that handles bulk fuel and scrap at the foot of Sassafras. The infrastructure that runs this corridor was largely installed under the 1965, 1971, and 1981 editions of the National Electrical Code, and a great deal of it is still in service. Forensic work here is correspondingly busy.
Each matter is opened as a Case File with a permanent number — CF-2024-198, CF-2025-071, CF-2026-014 — and stays open in our records for ten years after the last filing. Reports are issued under one of eight numbered Protocol headings (Reports R-01 through R-08, indexed on the Reports page), each of which corresponds to a defined methodology, a published standard or family of standards, a documented set of instruments calibrated to ISO 17025 traceability, and a stable per-engineer rate. Nothing in the firm’s practice is bespoke; nothing in it is “creative.” The point of forensic engineering is reproducibility — the next engineer who walks the scene with the same standards in hand should reach the same finding.
§2How we arrive at a scene
Most of our retainers begin by telephone, typically within four hours of an event. A property insurer’s field adjuster, a plant engineer, or a litigation paralegal calls the office line (+1 814 422 7589); the call rolls to whichever principal is on rotation. We ask three questions in the first call — what happened, who is there now, and what has been moved — and then we either dispatch the same day or schedule a scene visit within 48 hours, depending on whether anything live remains. If the structure is still being suppressed, we wait. USFA-trained marshals control the scene until release; our job is not to interfere with theirs.
The scene visit produces an Exhibit Log — photographs at the eight standard cardinal points required by NFPA 921 §19, control-panel and disconnect-switch interior photos with the door labels visible, conduit dressing photographs at every transition, samples retained per ASTM E1188. Where instrumentation will help — a Dranetz PowerVisa PX5 on the upstream switchboard, a Fluke 1773 on the suspect feeder, a Hioki PQ3198 for IEC 61000-4-30 Class A logging — we deploy it that day and leave it on the system for the duration the report requires, typically seven to fourteen days.
The Filed Record exists because investigations that read like opinion read like advocacy, and the engineering profession in this country was built to publish, not to argue. Three of our four principals teach an evening section at Penn State Behrend, and the quarterly is partly an outlet for the methodology lectures and partly an obligation to the bar. If a finding from our reports is going to be cited in cross-examination, we would prefer it be cited from a published number, not from an email.
§3What this firm will not do
We do not perform installation, retrofit, or remediation work. The firm holds no PA Labor & Industry contractor license and is not registered to build under the PA Uniform Construction Code. We do not accept retainers from parties on both sides of a contested matter, and we will withdraw without exception when a conflict surfaces mid-investigation. We do not testify in jurisdictions where we are not licensed; the firm’s engineers carry PE licensure in Pennsylvania (PE 047589, 052187, 064411) and current reciprocity in Ohio and New York, and additional jurisdictions are pursued only when an open Case File requires it.
We do not work to a predetermined conclusion. A litigation paralegal who calls in May expecting a finding by the deposition cut-off in July is treated identically to one who calls without a deadline. We do not redact findings to suit client preference; if the finding is inconsistent with the retaining party’s theory of the case, that is the finding that appears in the sealed report, and it is the retaining party’s prerogative to file or withdraw. We do not provide free site visits in the hope of conversion to retainer; the first scene visit, regardless of outcome, is billed at the published hourly rate.
What we do do, on every matter we open, is finish the file. The firm has closed 487 numbered Case Files since 2008; 23 of those were withdrawn by the retaining party before sealed report; the remainder were filed in full to standards listed on the Filed Standards plate. The current docket and the historical ledger are both visible at the Case Files index.
§4Issue notes
This number is unusual in one respect — three of its four featured Case Files are 480 V secondary-side investigations on multi-phase loads, and the fourth is a 30 A shore-power pedestal. We did not plan it that way; the quarter happened to bring no high-voltage incidents. The summer issue (Vol. VIII No. 3) is expected to lean substation, with two pending matters under NESC §35 involving a 12.47 kV underground vault and a single-phase transformer rupture at an unspecified Erie County industrial park.
Three new authorities are cited on the Standards plate for the first time this issue: the 2022 revision of IEEE 519, the 2024 revision of IEEE C62.41.1, and the IEC 61000-4-30 Class A measurement methodology that the Hioki PQ3198 implements directly. The Discovery department this issue addresses three questions received from counsel about the relationship between calibrated incident energy and PPE Category selection under NFPA 70E §130; readers from outside the bar may safely skip Q-04 through Q-06.
The firm extends its thanks to Dr. Carl Tobermann of Mercyhurst University’s Ridge College of Intelligence Studies, who reviewed the chain-of-custody language in the Mill Creek tube mill report prior to publication, and to the Erie Reader’s J. Mariotti for the 2026 cover photograph at Presque Isle State Park that introduces the Marina case file.
Also in this issue ↓
- Discovery — fourteen questions received from counsel and insurer staff this quarter
- Principals roster — four PE-sealed engineers with updated court-testimony records
- Filed Standards plate — every authority cited in this issue, with full URL
- How to advance a matter — intake form and the documents we ask you to bring