Question for @microbet :
I got home once years ago to a burst water pipe, but before I realised this I had touched the wall and got a huge shock from it.
Should I be dead (in relation to this incident only)?
Asking to find out how many of my 9 are left.
Last year during a really bad storm here a tree in our backyard got hit by lightning and split the stree down the middle. Probably 60 feet tall and about 20 feet of it is still standing. Scared the shit outta me. I’d take a pic but it’s already dark at 4:45 here. Electricity is not something to mess with imo.
If bare skin is touching both wires of 120 then it’s very dangerous. You probably won’t die but you certainly could. As you say 100 mA can kill you. The resistance of dry skin is like 100k ohm so if you’re not sweaty you’ll be ok and only get hit by a few milliamps. But if you are sweaty or have a cut on your finger the resistance can be 1000 ohm or less. It’s not all that likely but it happens all the time. So saying it might “easily” kill you might be the wrong word to use but it is definitely feasible and completing a circuit with your body on 120 V is very dangerous. Not at all something to be taken lightly. And I’m sure those electricians were not testing 120 v circuits with their fingers holding the neutral wire in their other hand.
By capacitance I mean capacitance. For AC, resistance isn’t the only thing to consider when determining if current will flow through a circuit. You have to look at impedance, which is determined by a circuit’s resistance, capacitance and inductance. So the rubber soled shoes might act as an infinite resistor between your body and ground but not as an infinite capacitor. So you can still get a bit of current through you even if you’re separated from ground by an infinite resistor. But certainly nothing dangerous at 120 V or even much higher. But if you’re working on a DC circuit at the same voltage it doesn’t matter if there is nonzero capacitance between you and ground. For DC resistance is the only thing that matters.
But I think that as a practical matter the only way to actually get electrocuted at normal voltages is through a resistive path to ground.
Probably not, but that’s pretty effed up that you got a shock from that. Something else was wrong besides the burst pipe and probably that way before you got shocked. Sometimes a nail in a wall or something will hit an electric wire and then everything wet could lead to you getting shocked. Good chance something hot had been making contact with the water pipe for a long time and you could have been shocked somewhere else, which reminds me of this:
Ladders are the most dangerous thing on the construction site. That’s true statistically anyway. It doesn’t help the stats that people do stuff like this:
I’ve stopped driving down the street to help/get someone to stop doing something wrong on a ladder. People often set them up way way way too leaned over.
That’s weird. Ok, if you’re wearing rubber shoes you might possibly feel something if you lick a hot 120v wire and touch nothing else.
There’s some advice people give in the electrical world, not to electricians really, but more to inspectors or something like that, to keep one hand in your pocket. Unless you’re barefoot in a puddle or something or leaning up against something that’s well grounded, it’s hard to get a serious shock with one hand. If you get hit from one part of your hand to another part of the same hand you’ll feel it, but it won’t touch your heart.
I routinely do some of the things in those pictures.
There are one or two that look reasonably safe (mostly using ladders to make a scaffold). Most are insane though.
Oh by the way I didn’t mean rubber electrician’s safety boots, I mean just regular shoes with rubber soles. Probably wouldn’t let much DC through but you’d definitely feel it if you touch the live AC wire. I’d imagine actual electrical safety equipment is much better isolated both from AC and DC.
No you wouldn’t. If everything is dry and you are wearing regular tennis shoes and you do a blind test of a hot 120v wire with one hand and dead one you won’t be able to tell the difference. Ok, still don’t do this. Don’t do it. I will not prop bet this. But still you wouldn’t feel anything.
Of course the internet has this
Don’t worry I’m definitely not doing that
Microbet I’m sorry that happened to you! I got a major shock once, my right arm went instant princess mononoke and when I involuntarily screamed my tongue was fluttering like a kite tail. Terror unlimited. A Percy Wetmore horror show.
My dad used to tell a story about one of his buddies breaking into a rival fraternity house. A group of them tip-toed over and hid in the bushes and watched as their friend used the fire escape to scramble up the side to the second-floor window. Just as the dude was about to go through the window his whole body clinched and then he went flying off the side of the house, landing on a table that semi-broke his fall. It turned out that the rival fraternity house—and btw this was all happening at an engineering school—had foreseen this very moment and decided to wire their fire escape with significant electricity, and then, the moment having arrived, they patiently watched the poor dude climb until I guess they felt he had climbed high enough to murder, and flipped the switch. I’ll bet they never thought it would work so well! Somehow everyone lived, but as punishment the fraternity was suspended or paddled or helicoptered to vietnam or whatever. My dad’s not one to exaggerate so I’m guessing the electrocution more or less happened as described, lol 1960s, lol white people, lol that 95% of the imbeciles in the story are now probably in charge of stuff
A friend of mine in HS was up in some kind of portable lift that became electrified and slowly fried him for minutes before they could get him down. He had to have skin grafts all over his back and neck. Sweet $5/hr temp job.
I worked on a job with some power line guys who told stories about “making contact” that mostly ended in death. The one guy who lived - his elbow exploded and his arm cooked from the inside out. He had many other ongoing problems and had to eventually have a leg amputated or something.
Geez, that’s harsh.
No need to be sorry. I was just stupid. I didn’t get hurt. I’m actually better off now, because it gave me superpowers, er, I mean because I definitely won’t do that again for at least another 5 years.
Before the transformer on residential power lines it’s on the order of 10k volts. The big metal towers are on the order of 300k volts. That’s all very different stuff. Arcs can travel and you can get killed just getting near those conductors.
Tying into a comment from another thread, power line workers consistently make the top 10 for workplace fatalities every year.
Was working at a job as a plumber apprentice for the construction of some facility for the DST Company here in KC. Excavation for the underground placement of these huge receptacles for water storage and other utilities was underway.
Anyway, I got pulled off the job to go elsewhere, and the very next day the crane operator swung his boom into power lines, and the ‘headache ball,’ to which workers fasten or remove loads via connecting-shackle was still at a very close proximity to the ground and thereby workers.
The jolt traveled down the cable and had some release into the atmosphere, no one died, but it fucked at least one dude pretty bad for life. He required disability at some point not long thereafter iirc