(WPXI Interviewer) You have a little circuit, can you explain to us how this is supposed to work?

(Chief Deputy Fire Marshall, Don Bricker) 
Well, absolutely, a typical circuit breaker will operate it's either on or off.  Okay.

And it makes a pretty loud noise when you're clicking it back and forth.

When it goes into a trip positon, when there's trouble on that circuit, uh... it should operate how it's designed and go into a trip position.

So again, if I'm holding it this way, and typically they're mounted into a panel like that, that would be in the on position [click] that would be in the off position.

If it's tripped, it would go in the middle.

So there's play either way.

If a breaker trips in your house, the worst thing to do is just go automatically kick it back in if you have no idea what tripped it.

Because once it's in a tripped position, it should make that circuit safe.

So there's no more energy to whatever tripped that circuit.

So again, if you have a breaker in its tripped position, get somebody to come look at it.

If you don't have any idea why it tripped, we don't want to start turning it back off and on.

We've had events with that, when we have a fire downstream, the breaker [click] activates like it should, and then the homeowner or the occupant will go back down there and see a trip, not knowing what's going on [click] and re-energize it again.

And then, we hear more often than not, [click] it trips again and then they want to [click] reset it again.

We have to make that perfectly clear, if it does trip, leave it tripped, do not re-energize a circuit, have somebody come and look at it.