Danny Phantom Eating My Soul For Breakfast

Overall, we don't really know what kind of electrical engineering background the Fentons have have. It's never clearly stated. Electricity is insanely dangerous. It's incredibly easy to fuck up. All of our safety protocols are written in ashes, not blood, because electricity can so easily literally burn you into ashes. Especially at high voltage.

The kind of project the Fentons work on would require an indepth knowledge, so I'd assume that they have electrical background to some degree beyond the basics.

This is the blueprints we see for the portal in the theme song.

Obviously, this is just for the actual construction of the ghost portal itself. This isn't related to the electrical parts at all. Those prints are set up completely different. My point here is NOT that they don't know how to set up an electrical print; the point is that this is just not an electrical print for context.

For a 66kv/111kv electrical substation

For a household water heater

Basically, if you're working with electricity, this is the kind of blueprints you're looking at. This is the kind of diagram that tells you how to properly wire the devices. And this has been the standard since at least the 50s. I work in substations built as early as the 40s, and the prints are the exact same format. We can also assume cartoon logic as most people know what blueprints look like. I doubt the average viewer would know what these are.

I'm stating this too because it's another way of saying that like. We honestly genuinely cannot tell for sure how the Fenton Portal is wired since we don't see the diagrams, and we're not able to be there physically in person to determine how and why. It's impossible to truly tell what the actual purpose of that button is. It definitely looks like a safety stop button, and I think the OP provides a super good case for it. Based on the image the OP provided, I'm assuming OP took this from a gas or water utility company, which is similar to electrical but electrical is a bit different.

But from an electrical substation perspective, there's no real safety on/off switch. If you're needing to remove power, you're not often turning a switch off. You're adding a grounding wire or you're pulling fuses. Safety switches aren't really a thing (or at least, I've never seen one in a substation before), but this is also a private household and NOT an electrical substation, so I'd assume that the Fentons WOULD have one. And if so, I definitely think that they'd have one similarly to what OP noted.

An important but unrelated thing I also wanna note to is like. You guys do realize that people are human who make mistakes? A lot of people talk about the Fenton Portal under the assumption that Jack and Maddie were completely ignoring safety standards.

Wiring a huge project like a Fenton Portal would be a long, tedious, difficult process. It takes my job months to do install a new piece of equipment at the substation, because it's a slow process. You have to be careful. Every step has to be checked after completion. Troubleshooting has to happen. Certain parts have to be fully depowered in order to work on it safely, and sometimes you have to find a way to keep power going so you can work on it so it's a process to figure out how to jump power for safe working.

There's literally thousands of wires, hundreds of terminals, tens of panels. A single bad wire can stump a crew, and it could be that the guy wired it to the wrong spot, that the connection is bad. If the wire itself it bad, depending on the wire, it's a whole working day process to pull it out and run a new one because of how complex, tight, dangerous, etc, it is. We get (mildly) shocked all the time because it's just the nature of the job.

We specifically see that the FentonWorks Portal wasn't working, and they took a break when Danny decided to investigate. Any number of thing could be wrong. I don't think that the Fentons specifically forgot about the emergency off button, but that they didn't know what the issue was. There could be hundreds of things that went wrong, and they hadn't gotten to the point of troubleshooting this yet. Literally a singular wire could be bad because it's a bad wire, bad connection from the wire to the lug, bad connection from the lug to the terminal, bad terminal connection, bad terminal, etc.

Also additionally, just for some lowkey fun: We all see shots of the inside of the portal looking like this (all from Memory Blank)

Do you know what this kind of looks like to me? Kind of reminds me a lot of how the outside of electrical substation control panels look and operate.

Depending on what level of knowledge they have and experience, I could see some of the lines not just being cool technology showcases, but a common electrical substation practice: we use markers or tape to basically copy the electrical print line diagram on the outside of the panels to help visually identify what's going on and where/how things are connected.

Even the kind of cable that's being run looks exactly like the kind of cable used in most substations.