Electrical shock survivors

Passinwind said:
we had a mandatory safety class every year
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At long as you're not the reason for the training, it's all good

Did you also have to watch "will you be here tomorrow?" I grew up in WA and every our shop teacher showed us that one. He might've been deranged, though…

At a state fair we had a booth with lineman and a scale model to demo (to kids) the dangers of power lines. They even did the hot dog on a live wire (behind plexiglass).
 
jessenator said:
At long as you're not the reason for the training, it's all good

Did you also have to watch "will you be here tomorrow?" I grew up in WA and every our shop teacher showed us that one. He might've been deranged, though…

At a state fair we had a booth with lineman and a scale model to demo (to kids) the dangers of power lines. They even did the hot dog on a live wire (behind plexiglass).
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Yeah, some variation of that vid at least. That class was on like the first day of that job, which initially was a 7 month temp contract mostly counting fish tracks on a computer screen. So not what I envisioned at all, but it turned out that we rigged miles and miles of SONAR cable on the intake decks, working around the normal day to day dam operations, and you had to pay a lot of attention for sure.
 
A couple ex-bandmates used to live in this totally illegal sub-leased basement apartment in a ghetto neighbourhood, NO GROUND on the house wiring...Straight up...Scorch marks eminating from the light fixtures in the kitchen.

Sitting across the room from one another, both playing guitars plugged into two different amps, if we shook hands you'd get a nice mild tingle flowing through your body.

hehe That tickles!!!

I don't even want to know what crackheads wired that house if it's not burned down by now..
 
I had a 240V zap once as a kid wiring up my own light fitting (!). I suspect I was lucky because it just felt like someone yanking on my arm and I had no after effects.

Once I was walking home from high school and it was very cloudy and I could hear thunder. Thought no more of it as I walked between Aussie rules goal posts at an oval on my way home. A lot of goal posts here are made of steel, and they can be quite tall. The oval was surrounded by trees and park but I was walking across the football ground. A few seconds after I went between the goal posts I heard a huge CRACK which deafened me for some minutes and of course saw a very bright flash. It kinda pushed me forward and the air was zinging. Took me a while to work out exactly what had happened. Think I got lucky on that one.
 
Erik S said:
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.
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And the partner behind now operates with a very long pole to pull the individual to safety in case there's arcing. I always thought it fun that people run around with fire to detect the start of electrical current leaks that occur before the arcs.

I've had a few, with one resulting in what can only be called "a pink lava lamp" that replaced my concept of vision and environmental awareness, and oddly resolved hand jitters. Completely accidental shock. Felt tired after that but all good since. I do have a screwdriver tip that has seen better days due to being zapped on a capacitor bank.

I've been indoors when a lighting strike hit the field opposite, close enough you could throw a tennis ball at, the windows almost shook out of the frame.

RF burns are another nasty - even with MHz low voltage I've managed to burn a spot on a finger.

Not had a shock recently thankfully.
 
Fun fact: the author of the famous “no taxation without representation” line was a lawyer names James Otis. He was killed by lightning while watching a storm through an open door in 1783…
 
Not sure if I've mentioned this before - sorry if I have...I was on a job shooting stills for an agency who was making TVCs about cyclone safety in the north of Australia. While having dinner one night the director was talking about a sound guy who he saw get zapped by HT lines at a train depot. He had a long carbon fibre mic boom which got too close to the HT lines and the electricity arced from the lines to the boom and shocked him quite badly. He survived apparently. The director asked if anyone had seen him recently and what he was doing. I didn't know the fella but seeing as nobody responded I said "I heard he got into classical music performance". The director looked at me and asked "Oh, really?" So I said "Yeah. Apparently he's a really good conductor".
 
Mobile x-ray 120vdc battery bank was the most painful.
240vac supply feed ina x-ray room was the worst. I was leaned over on my knees into a big cabinet and the current mostly flowed from my right hand to my right elbow, rested on the chassis. Due to posture and self grounding, it grabbed me for a bit.
Oh, this was about 2 am and no one else was around. Found the source. Bare romex coming out of the drywall on a completely different circuit. I was livid. So many codes violations.

I don't work on x-ray anymore.
 
Ack!! I just juiced myself plugging in a AA battery charger.

I was kinda holding it a little akwardly, trying to plug it in. Sorta put my finger against the socket while I had a grip with a finger around the plug and it gave me a little love bite.

It got the first Joint in ring finger, just a tickle though...not bad, but damn!!

That reminded me of the Printing factory I used to work in, one of the Early to mid centrury offset press machines had somehow been wired by a monkey, or it was re-wired with no ground at some point or there was a loose connection, if you weren't careful and got too friendly it would let you know...Good thing I wore MKIII Combat boots, the soles on those are like having hockey pucks taped to your feet.

Sure tickles your funny bone.
 
pricklyrobot said:
Romex even being in the same building as an x-ray machine is 🤯
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We don't got Romex here. Wonderded why. Found a highly liked joke instead: "After WWII we sent all the existing round romex machinery to Europe for the rebuilding efforts. We sent them the round because it’s easier for their skinny soccer playing arms to pull through drilled holes. We retained the machinery to make flat, hard pulling cable because our manly American arms have no trouble with it. After that it just stuck."
 
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