Ind. Man Survives 69,000-Volt Shock

[jamotto]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...lectrical_shock

[street228]

NOT a smart man!! another interesting thing with HIGH voltage contact: If one does survive the actual incident..There is a very high probability that several days following the event, tissue, which was subjected to the voltage, begins to die; and gangrene is the ultimate reason for death.

It would be interesting to see a report of this mans condition, in a about week....just to see if

he has gone through any amputations..or whatever.

[Guest]

What a moron, that voltage is arc capable, and I mean BIG arcs, but it's not the voltage tht kills you, it's the amps, he was lucky that the amperage wsn't higher.

I can get shocked by 100,000 volts at 1/10 of an amp and be just shocked, but if it were at 1 amp, I'd be dead.

The guy was lucky that he got grazed and not hit by the true power behind that electricity.

It would have made a great Darwin award though.

[street228]

well, hopefully his luck holds out.

when I was in my early 20's, I did lineman work.(cleaning the insulators on high power feed lines coming in and out of substations. We had one set of lines(at the top) which carried 138000 volts.

I used an insulated bucket truck and high pressure air run through a hopper full of powdered limestone, to clean the dirt and grime off the insulators.(to avert archs to ground) The non-conductive wand I used to spray the insulators was about 15' long.

One morning, we dicided to start early, and my ground man had forgotten to blow out the wand. The condensation from the night before, was still inside the wand. The arch which blew the wand apart, and shorted the 138000 volt line direct to ground, was enormous.

The voltage followed the dew, which had condensated around the fibre glass boom of the bucket truck, down to the out riggers. It blew ALL 10 radial tires on the truck, fried all the electrical systems in the truck. and knocked the ground man about 30' away from the truck.

both my arms felt like they had been hit with a baseball bat. I sit down in the bucket, with no use of my arms, and could do nothing but wait for some help to arrive. I knew it would, as it blew the trips. They usually blow after their 3rd attempt to reset. Each reset was another explosion just a few feet away from me. The isulators had also disintergrated, and the line was laying directly on a ground cable, just below the suspension tower.

I was fortunate, and the high voltage had used the skin effect in its transfer from my insulated gloves to my elbows, which was resting on the edge of the fiberglass bucket.

The ground man survived. He had been leaning with one hand on the truck, when the accident had occured. It had blown his boots off. the voltage had gone through his right arm, and out his feet.

The doctors told us, when he was sitting in his bed bragging how he cheated death, on the second day, that his chances of survival were not so good.

two days later, they had to amputate his hand. two more days went by, and they had to amputate his feet. he survived another week before the gangrene had settled in his abdomine, and he died from uncontrollable infections, due to the dying tissue.

[ 06-03-2004, 01:29 PM: Message edited by: street ]

[Guest kenny87]

What was he doing climbing an electrical tower anyway?

[Charles Lindsey]

Volts x Amps = Watts. Useful little formula for not overloading a circuit. Like that 1750 watt hair dryer you own. 120v is standard american voltage. Plug 1750 watts into the formula and solve for amps and you see how close you come to tripping a 15 amp breaker.

Also, double the volts and halve the amperage. It's why cars went to 12v systems ages ago.

Dunno how it applies to this though. Just odd trivia bouncing around in my head.