I asked this question wwwayyyyyyyy back in 1999 or so. I can’t find it in a search, and I don’t remember the answer I got.
Anyway, in the Springfield metro area are several abandoned commercial buildings, some of which have been abandoned for decades. On many of them, there are still exterior lights shining.
One example is a building that used to be a Wendy’s, and closed some time in the late 80’s. Yet some of the exterior lights (a couple bulbs here and there) are on every night.
Those lights wouldn’t come on unless electricity was flowing to them. Electricity wouldn’t flow to them unless there was an active account with our local electric utility. The local electric utility wouldn’t maintain that account unless someone paid the bill every month. Ergo, someone is paying to shine a few watts of electric light onto a sidewalk around a former Wendy’s that closed during the Bush 41 administration, which sits, boarded up, in an empty lot a good hundred yards from the nearest occupied building.
WTF?
Can anyone provide a good explanation for this phenomenon?
In many industrial buildings, the meter and electrical panel are inside the building. If the electrical company can’t gain access it is difficult if not impossible for them to to turn off the power unless then want to pull the wires off at the pole. In a large building there won’t even be a pole, the power comes in through an underground vault.
Bottom line is you can leave a few light bulbs on for years and years for the expense the power company would go though to pull the power on many buildings.
Buildings that haven’t been used in years are not abandoned. They still belong to somebody. Somebody still has them on the books as an asset. They pay taxes, insurance, and in some cases, utilities.
When I was a kid, I got in trouble for not knowing this. I slipped into a couple of “abandoned” buildings to look around (and in one case, loot the candy bar machine.) I was mistaken. The owner didn’t want me in there.
Now, why would an owner hold on to a moldering hulk of bricks and mortar? If I knew, maybe I’d be in that kind of business myself. They have some plans for it, and they’re willing to wait until the time is right. :rolleyes: In the meantime, they’re paying the light bill and making a perfunctory effort to keep it from falling down.
Please note that I didn’t intend any snarkiness in my reply. It’s just that when someone says they can’t find something, I see it as a challenge to my search skills. (Pathetic, I know.)
I would modify that statement to say “are not necessarily abandoned.”
An investment is still an investment, even if it isn’t paying off right now. Surely every town has the same old story about the crazy old guy who bought hundreds of acres of cheap land outside of town and never did anything with it until one day someone decided to build a highway, or a mall, or a mega-used-car-lot, or some such nonsense and paid the old man or his heirs big bucks for that land.
My SO and I have speculated that these forlorn lights might be, in addition to cheap security, an easy way to determine if the power is still running to a building. Even if a building is empty, wouldn’t it still be required to have fire prevention/supression equipment, like sprinklers or alarms? If the building is somewhere that gets cold, then you would also need heat, to keep the water pipes from freezing. Having a light burning would be an easy way to signal that the power and the heat and alarms are still on.
It might be to detect or deter vagrants as well I suppose. Perhaps it’s for the police to be able to more easily (in theory) make sure no one is using the premises for ad hoc sleeping quarters?