Electrical shock survivors

tegendemuur

tegendemuur

Well-known member
"Steve Marshburn Sr., who founded Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International in 1989, told me that he was struck at age 25 on a seemingly clear November morning in 1969. He was working as a teller at First Citizens Bank in Swansboro, North Carolina, sitting at the drive-through window, and he thinks the bolt must have passed through an ungrounded speaker. For years, he struggled not only with debilitating headaches and back problems, but also with the sheer improbability of the event that had produced them. Many of the doctors he visited didn’t believe his story. For a long time, even his parents wondered whether he was making the whole thing up.

And to some extent, Marshburn understands why. “It’s so unbelievable that it’s hard to talk about,” he said. Eventually, a doctor introduced him to another patient who had survived an electrical injury, and that experience led Marshburn to start his survivors’ group. Membership now numbers about 2,000, and in September the organization hosted its first-ever West Coast conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. For years, most people found their way to the group via their local weather station, or after seeing it featured in news outlets or on TV. Now more find it through Facebook."

Via: https://archive.is/20260317022238/h.../lightning-strike-survivors-body-mind/686057/

Anyone here lucky to be alive after some electrical... Adventure?
 
I was opening my front door one morning to leave for work in the 90's and my hair rose up when the tree 30' from me was struck. No direct hits, thankfully.

Again, in the 90's, I did take 510VDC between my thumb and wrist which blew off my thumb nail (about 4 feet away) and left the nailbed smoking. Someone before me modified a client's 70's Marshall 1959 and energized a part which should have had no B+ applied to it and my thumb touched it and my wrist was touching the chassis. I turned everything off on my bench and retreated to the living room with a couple glasses of scotch and an ibuprofen. My whole body was sore for a day or two.
 
Yeah, got shocks plenty. But only of the kind that feels like how a mom would tap / slap her naughty child on the hand.

Here in the factory they work with high voltages for lasers and what not. This dude has to come in every other day to disconnect and connect these machines, after maintanance and all. Has to dress up in thick fire protection cleanroom clothing (against flame arcs, or whatever they're called in English), but he knows that when he gets that juice through him, his meat will melt of his bones into his boots. It's the thought that counts... 😅
 
tegendemuur said:
Has to dress up in thick fire protection cleanroom clothing (against flame arcs, or whatever they're called in English), but he knows that when he gets that juice through him, his meat will melt of his bones into his boots.
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I worked in a factory for a few years where I was one of the techs who got to don the arc resistant cleanroom suit for electrical work.

As part of our electrical safety training we had to watch a video that included CCTV footage of a worker dying in a high voltage accident.

The screen went white with the arc flash and then came back to just a cloud of pink mist and a pair of boots with feet still in them. The rest of the guy was completely vaporized.
 
Erik S said:
I worked in a factory for a few years where I was one of the techs who got to don the arc resistant cleanroom suit for electrical work.

As part of our electrical safety training we had to watch a video that included CCTV footage of a worker dying in a high voltage accident.

The screen went white with the arc flash and then came back to just a cloud of pink mist and a pair of boots with feet still in them. The rest of the guy was completely vaporized.
Click to expand...
No thanks
 
Erik S said:
I worked in a factory for a few years where I was one of the techs who got to don the arc resistant cleanroom suit for electrical work.

As part of our electrical safety training we had to watch a video that included CCTV footage of a worker dying in a high voltage accident.

The screen went white with the arc flash and then came back to just a cloud of pink mist and a pair of boots with feet still in them. The rest of the guy was completely vaporized.
Click to expand...
That guy always looks like he's about to drown in his suit. Takes off the cap and you see the water rush down on his chest. Sure was an easy conversation starter... And thus I got to know a bit about his job.

Didn't know it would amount to near total disintegration!
 
tegendemuur said:
That guy always looks like he's about to drown in his suit. Takes off the cap and you see the water rush down on his chest. Sure was an easy conversation starter... And thus I got to know a bit about his job.

Didn't know it would amount to near total disintegration!
Click to expand...
I think the horror video was from some sort of electrical generation facility running unfathomably high levels.

Nothing in the plant I was working at was more than around 460v and anything I actually had to work on was well under that.

Still enough to possibly kill me, but my corpse would have been recognizable.
 
In middle school, everyone had to rotate electives one year and so everyone took shop class for a few weeks. The shop teacher thought it would be good to "teach" everyone about electricity. He made everyone in class stand in a circle and hold hands while he put around 10,000 volts thru us.
 
Been jolted by 120VAC many times thru the years. It just surprised me. Been hit by a 10K VAC furnace ignition x-former once while in the service. That one I'll never forget. Hand and arm tingled for days.

What surprised me the absolute most was when I serving as a home electrical assistant for a leathered old man in north central Indiana back in the 70's. He gave me a Wigginton meter and insisted that I use it to check for live wires before I EVER touched a bare wire. But tI saw him at a 220VAC 3-phase breaker box on a farm silo one day and he was checking for live voltages by stretching the fingers of one hand across the connections. Amazed I asked him why he wasn't getting thrown to the ground when doing so. He said he has a very high skin resistance to electricity and can do up to 220VAC with only a strong tingle - but always used the Wiggy for anything he suspected might higher. He also re-emhasized his warning to me to ALWAYS use the Wiggy such testing and would fire me if he caught doing what he did.
 
I got pretty badly shocked by a vacuum cleaner when I worked at a music store. Pretty scary, but I didn’t have any long term effects from it.

Idk why, but I’m insanely susceptible to static shocks. Nobody else in my house gets them, but I get them REAL bad all the time. Had some so bad that my entire arm went numb for 10+ minutes after.
 
I got shocked with 220V once which was hurtful but was ok. A couple of years later I got hit with something around 470V and it shocked me quite hard. It took me a solid 15 minutes to understand what happened or think "clear" again because I was so shocked.
I really wanna build a tube amp one day but the last encounter I just mentioned will probably keep me away from ever doing that. I built a couple of C2C Electronics pedals last year and on those I was super careful about what I was doing.
 
Was "working" on an Italian VOX Jaguar clone and noticed the lamp dimness was a result of it not sitting far enough up inside the jewel, so I decided to …push it back into place. Roommate just stood there looking down at me thinking I'd died. Didn't call the paramedics. Just stood there.
 
Several professions ago I was a theater set and lighting designer. The worst shock I got was at the top of a 25 foot a frame, when I went to tighten a spot that someone hadn’t tightened properly to a rail. So I had an assistant turn the lights on, so I could make sure it was in the correct position. When the screwdriver tip touched the focusing lock on the light, there was a loud snap, and the screwdriver flew from my hand. I felt some sort of jolt in my hand, but not too badly. The 220v pigtail had been miswired on one of the lamps and the entire pole was hot. I was lucky. The screwdriver, which I kept for years, had a melted tip on it. I’ve had a number of 117v shocks, again, luckily none that passed through much of me.
 
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