Man saves friend from electrocution - GIF

[tonyfoale]

I have been on the receiving end of nearly being electrocuted its no fun. Sweaty gloves aluminum ladder 16 feet off the ground ac welder and some how managed to break the insulation off the handle of the stinger which immediately managed to find a hole in one of my gloves luckily the setting on the welder was only for 90 amps.
when it caught hold of me all I could focus on was to make sure I tightened my grip on the ladder with my left hand and yell out shut it off shut it off several times. the jolting from the current passing from one hand through the other made my whole buddy jerk finally my jerking movements dislodged the stinger from my right hand and the pathway for the current was broken when I dropped the stinger I grabbed another ladder rung with my right hand and just hung on for a few moments then managed to climb down with out falling but it was several minutes before I could talk coherently just broken or clipped words and part sentences.
they always say its not the volts but the amps that get you well 90 amps at 27Volts AC hurts and could easily kill

Whilst being electrocuted one's thoughts do not always focus on ohm's law but it still applies. 27 V driving 90 A requires a resistance of no more than 27/90 = 0.3 ohms which is way to low for body resistance. Internal body resistance is in the order of a few 100s of ohms but unless you have broken skin at the contact points the skin resistance will be many times higher. For example dry skin will be up around 100 kohms. So taking a worst case open wound shock of 100 ohms the current from 27 V will only be 27/100 = 270 mA far removed from your 90 A, but way more than enough to do you very serious damage. Only very few mA is enough to be dangerous. Take the case of dry hands, there will be two skin contacts but lets just use one at 100,000 kohms the current from 27 V then will be 0.27 mA which is unlikely to be noticed.
It does not matter what current the power source is capable of supplying, what matters is what current the voltage can force through your body and those two things are very different.

[Frank S]

Whilst being electrocuted one's thoughts do not always focus on ohm's law but it still applies. 27 V driving 90 A requires a resistance of no more than 27/90 = 0.3 ohms which is way to low for body resistance. Internal body resistance is in the order of a few 100s of ohms but unless you have broken skin at the contact points the skin resistance will be many times higher. For example dry skin will be up around 100 kohms. So taking a worst case open wound shock of 100 ohms the current from 27 V will only be 27/100 = 270 mA far removed from your 90 A, but way more than enough to do you very serious damage. Only very few mA is enough to be dangerous. Take the case of dry hands, there will be two skin contacts but lets just use one at 100,000 kohms the current from 27 V then will be 0.27 mA which is unlikely to be noticed.
It does not matter what current the power source is capable of supplying, what matters is what current the voltage can force through your body and those two things are very different.

Trust me, when there is a current passing through your body from one hand to the other that is high enough to cause involuntary muscle contractions while standing on a ladder you are thinking of only 2 things first is how can I break the contact and 2nd not falling off the stupid ladder thinking that falling off the ladder may even be the best choice. The longer you are in the situation the greater the amount of moisture your body is going to produce through your hands until if someone were to put an ohm meter in circuit it would show a near perfect continuity at which time it is all over. I should have never been on that aluminum ladder in the first place because I had a wooden ladder, I could have been using but the thing was so heavy it took two people to stand it up.

[tonyfoale]

Trust me, when there is a current passing through your body from one hand to the other that is high enough to cause involuntary muscle contractions while standing on a ladder you are thinking of only 2 things first is how can I break the contact and 2nd not falling off the stupid ladder thinking that falling off the ladder may even be the best choice. The longer you are in the situation the greater the amount of moisture your body is going to produce through your hands until if someone were to put an ohm meter in circuit it would show a near perfect continuity at which time it is all over. I should have never been on that aluminum ladder in the first place because I had a wooden ladder, I could have been using but the thing was so heavy it took two people to stand it up.

That is all true except that your resistance does not drop to near zero. If someone put at ohm meter on you when sweating it would be measuring the resistance through the sweat in parallel with your body not through your body. You resistance will have dropped compared to the dry condition but not to near zero.
I was only pointing out that just because the welder is set on 90 A does not mean that 90 A will be passing through your body. It only takes mAs to cause muscle contractions.

[Frank S]

That is all true except that your resistance does not drop to near zero. If someone put at ohm meter on you when sweating it would be measuring the resistance through the sweat in parallel with your body not through your body. You resistance will have dropped compared to the dry condition but not to near zero.
I was only pointing out that just because the welder is set on 90 A does not mean that 90 A will be passing through your body. It only takes mAs to cause muscle contractions.

Yep If 90 amps were passing through it would have been 2 wires stuck in a hotdog then plugged into a wall socket. well, done in seconds. Even at that it wouldn't have been the 15 amps of the circuit, it would have been the length of the wires extending into the hot dog verses. circular diameter and the moisture content of the hot dog determining the amount of resistance. to account for how many mAs or full amps plus the total amount of seconds to boil the moisture cooking the hotdog.

The longer I was completing the circuit the more accumulative I could feel the effects intensifying.

[Frank S]

electrocution or even just being shocked effects people differently some have a higher tolerance to being shocked but once your muscles contract into a death grip from being shocked there is very little if anything you can do to physically will them to release if the current path is from your feet to one of your hands you can't even will your other arm to knock your hand free. I know from my own experience all I could do was concentrate on trying not to loose my grip with my left hand I couldn't even sense what my other hand was doing. fortunately my muscles in my other arm were causing it to flail around or something until the contact was momentarily broken allowing me to drop the stinger.
An electrician friend of mine got knocked into the main buss of a 480v panel by a gust of wind. he only received an instantaneous shock that knocked him away from the buss. He said for several minutes later the only thing he could do was try and force himself to breathe because breathing was no longer autonomous for him and every fiber of his body hurt for a long while.
being shocked like I was makes me doubly aware of the possibility of it happening again even though I will still climb a metal ladder and weld with an AC machine I make sure there is no possibility of bare skin coming in contact with any metal surfaces especially when changing rods if my hands and gloves might be sweaty and all of my stingers have good insulation and no bare metal to them.

[Crusty]

I was welding outside in a mist one day and I was sitting on a metal frame that was being welded (it was wet from the mist). My gloves were also wet from the mist and when I started to install a new stick in my stinger I got the peewaddy knocked out of me (pants got wet from sitting on the frame, gloves wet too). Luckily I was able to rip the rod from the stinger using my upper body muscles which still worked and break the circuit. I learned three things from this incident: electrons are really fast, don't weld in the rain and a safe appearance doesn't guarantee that something is.

[f800]

Electrocution will certainly cause rhabdomyolysis, which is a disruption of skeletal muscle integrity which would make you feel like you’ve been run over by a train. Of course, the higher the energy load , the more extensive the damage

[marksbug]

I thought they were just trying to get his blood moving in his extreamities..

[Jon]

[Toolmaker51]

Notice; while not such a heavy sign, one tire off the ground on what has to be crane truck. 3 of ground crew drop when metallic sign hits overhead wires; of course, they're manipulating load by hand. Near guarantee could have been averted with taglines AND one observer signaling crane operator. Too many bystanders, no crewleader.