The moral of this story is never ever lower your guard when doing anything around electricity. Regular visitors to this site know that we always TEST the power pole in all caravan parks before connecting. We were parked in the front yard of a long term CMCA member and in helping us set up he pulled an already connected lead out of his garage and plugged it in. We ALWAYS have a tester plugged into one of our 240 power points. Looking at this is automatic! Yes the lead was faulty and the green and amber lights glowed indicating faults. Looking at both the plug and socket revealed that active, neutral and earth were all correctly connected. As recommend by Geoff Adcock we next ran along the complete lead looking for damage and feeling for flattened areas. We found several. On checking with our fellow motorhomer we found that the lead was used on a bitumen apron and "regularly" run over by vehicles. This is a giant no no! What had happened here was the conductors were "leaking" into each other due to the flattening. Interestingly this was a newish home and had the latest RCD safety switches and these did not trip! Worrying stuff! Another problem was the voltage read a very high 250 volts! Fridges hate high voltage! This member was not into anything technical and was blissfully unaware of the problems.

So to learn from this we will in future ONLY use our own leads and if bush fires are around check the mains voltage, as this can cause all sorts of very nasty problems.