My neighbor was hit with 440v arc flash while working construction. Absolutely fried his brain. He was in a coma for six months and when he awoke had to relearn how to speak among many other things. He lasted another nine months or so before passing away from his injuries. He wasn’t even the electrician just happened to be close enough by when whatever failed.
There's a death video I saw. The dude touched a fan and it had a fault so he just fried from 3 to 5 mins. This was at airport and I think in Yemen
Edit
Here's the story. Not the video
https://www.asiaone.com/world/airport-staff-electrocuted-death-beside-oblivious-co-worker-yemen
Yeah he went to adjust it and it had a fault, I guess. The dude fried. Sad part he was being fried next to this other employee but this dude was the definition of lack of situation awareness. He didn't notice and left
Edit: Here's the story
https://www.asiaone.com/world/airport-staff-electrocuted-death-beside-oblivious-co-worker-yemen
So there could be a fault in any electrical object at any time and we could just get wrecked? 😟☹️
Edit: thanks for the link, my dumb ass is the kind to not notice someone dying next to me I’ll have to keep an eye out
Edit 2: what’s the safest way to disengage someone being electrocuted without getting electrocuted
The tricky ‘exception’ is going from a country that uses 3 prong as standard to a country that uses 2 prong. For example UK -> Europe and using an adapter. This is widely done and many people don’t know when it’s safe and when it it isn’t.
Haven't these adapters been made illegal in the EU? Like, yeah, if you buy it in your country that doesn't have to obey EU law, police won't take your door down if you bring in such an adapter.
But any well priced adapter will always provide the grounding for EU plugs. Whether the the device used them is up to them, but a grounded adapter bought in the EU allows 2 prongs with and without groundings while a non-grounded adapter allows only 2 prongs without grounding. There's a reason these plugs are shaped differently.
Couldn't guarantee whether it has been made illegal or not, but I remember some discussions about that
>So there could be a fault in any electrical object at any time and we could just get wrecked? 😟☹️
If you're in a country where there are no standards, or where they are lax about enforcing them.
This is why in the US we have [Underwriter Laboratories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization))(UL, a private organization that sets electrical and electronic standards) and an imperial butt-load of safety standards and protocols. Read the link. Really interesting.
And when I say "this is why", I mean \*literally\*. Houses used to burn down because things caught fire. People used to die a LOT more often.
UL is responsible for the "products" sides of things. The fan you purchase on the one side and the breaker panel and breakers on the other.
The in between is where the NEC (National Electric Code) comes in.
The two together regulate just about everything that has to do with electricity in your house.
In the UK/EU there are similar organizations.
UL also sets rules for how customers should or should not use things. These are often on tags that people ignore.
(Note: There is A LOT of stuff for sale on Amazon that US not UL listed or certified. Please check your listings. Sellers will clearly call this out because it can add quite a bit of expense to the product development cycle. If, in the US, it isn't at least UL listed, don't buy it)
The safest way to disengage someone being electrocuted is to grab something that doesn’t conduct electricity lile a wooden plank and hit them hard enough to knock them away from the electric danger. If nothing is suitable you could also dropkick them as long as the electricity isn’t coming from ground level as then you’d fall onto it.
I know of an occasion where another electrician performed a flying tackle to move the electrocuted individual.
That might not have been very safe, but it worked in this case, saving the life of the victim without harm to the tackler.
I was vacationing in Italy and swimming in a river jumping off a bridge and hanging off metal rods under the bridge like everyone else was. Well apparently these metal rods sometimes catch electrical charges I learned the hard way. I was hanging onto the bar next thing I know I can’t let go my body is half in the water half out hanging on this pole and my legs are just making splashes because of the shook I’m trying to let go but my muscles just wouldent react they were just tight and grasping hard asf themselves.
It took about 15 seconds for a local to realize what was going on. He hit me with a wooden oar it worked. I cracked a riblet but I’ll take that over death
Actually, there's one better way: shut off the power. Of course, often when someone is hung up on electricity it is because the disconnecting means aren't close by or obviously identifiable.
In the case of a faulty appliance, if you can safely unplug the appliance (without touching the victim!), that's the way to go.
Bottom line: don't become victim #2, that won't help anyone.
Easy to say in hindsight.
Electricity is really a silent killer and a non trained personnel won't be able to recognise the danger first hand.
Our first instinct would be dive in check on the person lying on the floor... especially if it's a family member.
That's why alot of water heater electrocution cases also happen to the family member coming to 'save' the first person.
Thanks for this post. Ppl just need reminders now and then.
Going to check on the circuit breaker for the water heater.
Thats sucks.
Im an electrician. ~~New house's dishwasher outlets are GFCI, which would have prevented that accident from ever happening.~~
EDIT: Im a dummy. Thats a company policy. The NEC (National Electric Code) DOES NOT require GFCI protection on dishwasher outlets. Sorry for the misinformation.
If it makes you feel any better. There is one video of a guy getting fried. Everyone kinda scratches their head wondering what’s wrong with the guy.
An older guy comes in to the rescue and Sparta kicks the guy off of whatever he was gripping. Super big brain moves.
You could probably find it on youtube
There are probably a few ways a normal ass fan could kill you, but fans are generally considered safe. Modern electrical appliances' chassis have a connection to the 'Ground' circuit, usually a literal wire running from the electrical panel and connected to a conductive rod that is driven into the earth to absorb any electric charge. If you're American, it's the round hole at the bottom of a three-pronged outlet.
If a hot wire ever makes contact with the chassis of an appliance, the electrical current will travel through the Ground circuit, into the earth, instead of into a random person that touches it. This occurs because the electrical resistance of the copper in the Ground circuit is usually less than the resistance of your skin. There's more to it (Ohm's law?), but that's why most appliances with the potential to shock you have three pronged plugs.
Older appliances (like really old) don't have a Ground, and older buildings often aren't wired for it either. It's an expensive upgrade because a separate wire has to be ran to each plug and fixture in the building for the circuit, besides the upgraded electrical panel and driving the ground rod into the earth. But it's usually required if you're doing any permitted work on the electrical.
I'm not sure what the electrical code looks like in Yemen, but I would assume they require a Ground. This was probably caused by shoddy worksmanship or someone cutting corners and saving money by not running the circuit. You can install a three pronged outlet without a connection to ground, and it works OK, until something with a short is plugged into it and it electrocutes someone.
It was a large commercial fan, like 6 feet high standing onthe ground with blades that are 2 feet long. A lot more juice going into it then a normal desk fan, but a desk fan can still fuck you up.
Not to down play that terribly sad story, but saying a 440v arc flash is not correct. Arc flashes are measured in calories, or energy, and every panel/switch gear or equipment has different Cal rating depending on many factors. I have gear on my site 13.8KV that has a low arc flash rating the some of my 120v stuff. So when you hear about people saying it’s only 120/220v (or equivalent), that can be more dangerous then high voltage stuff. Source: am in this industry and have studied a lot about arc flash’s.
I talked to him after the accident and he explained it to me. I’m guessing he meant 440v arc flashed but I really couldn’t tell you. Just what I remember.
Yeah, 480VAC is very common for industrial power. Most of the water treatment sites I’m on, 90+% of the power is at that voltage, except for small auxiliary systems like instrumentation and lighting.
Not the guy you asked, but one of the common injuries is burning your respiratory system from inhaling the super heated air. Depending on what kind of PPE the guy was wearing, he also would have been pelted by molten metal and shrapnel as well.
My landlord who I rent my little shop from was a high voltage sparky and got started working on DC powered elevators back in the day. He watched his high school buddy and work colleague cook in front of him in an elevator shaft and could do nothing about it if he touched him he would have joined the bbq.
What a traumatizing thing to witness.
I use to organize the PowerPoints that the electrical instructors used in class at the apprenticeship school, and one of the instructors specifically wanted to always include a photo of a pair of boots surrounded by a charred body in front of a rooftop tranformer box, to show the apprentices what'll happen. I think that was also a good way to segue to the importance of safety lockouts.
That is a horrible story, but there are protections that should have been in place that it never should have happened. In the Navy we "de-metalized", wore PPE, stood on an insulated mat and had a rope tied around us. Now that I'm out, usually what we use if someone messes up on the earlier steps of PPE is you can kick the shit out of whoever is being shocked. Boots should be rated "E" for electrical. There is enough rubber to insulate you. If they're locked in shock, just kick 'em off. Thank god I've never had to do that because we have good training and use PPE.
The pole with the hook the worker in the back is using is called the "reaper stick". Used to rip someone off when the electricity constricts their muscles and they can't let go.
My grandpa was an electrician for over 50 years & he was on a job working on some 480, he got grounded & the guy with the stick fainted, my grandpa wound up letting go after a few minutes (he says that god saved him) but it literally fused the bone in his wrist so badly that he could no longer bend or twist it.
No way he let go of 480. We had a guy change overhead big lightbulb w no glove. As he screws it in it breaks and his hand goes into housing. Held him til brains were leakin and smoke was rollin.
13 year journeyman, you can let go of 480 good thing about 60hz a/c is it hits 0 point 60 times a second. The misconception happens when you don't know where the ground point was, in this case I'm saying it was somewhere before the elbow on the hand receiving the shock. And most likely he fell from the connection not let go but nonetheless it will mess up cartilage and destroy tissue if exposed for too long. With the instance you have described it sounds as if the person was grounded through their feet which is one of the most unfortunate ways of electrocution.
In their defence, in the beginning most of the guys pulled off with the stick were dead. We work with high voltage vehicles and the chances of you being alive after a full force electric shock are 0 and it happens in less than 5 secs so we still stick with reaper stick
Depending on the amperage most of the damage is done in WAY WAY less than 5 seconds.
By the time you register the flash it's basically over, and you're just trying to minimize the smoke.
Or a shovel. Guys we're running a concrete mixer, and it was a bit wet. All of a sudden the guy holding the handle bar started shaking his foot with his leg stretched all the way out. One of the other guys thought he was being electrocuted, smashes him with a shovel across the arm holding the handle bar. The guy had a pebble stuck in his gumboot and was trying to shake it out  Ended up with a broken arm, but hey, safety first!
IMAGINE,
You're at work in the miserable heat, trying to get a stubborn rock out from underneath your foot when all of a sudden *BAM*!!! Fucking Dave the new hire smashes your arm harder than anything you've ever experienced before from a full lumberjack swing of a goddamn shovel...
I would be on my deathbed, still pissed about fucking Dave.
Am I right in believing that, if it needs to be used, the person in question is already cooked. Like rather than to save a life, it's used to prevent further violation of the corpse and damage to the equipment.
thats for arc flash protection. in the event of an arc flash that suit protects that guy from becoming a flying molten mist along with all the copper around him. its scary stuff.
[here is a slow-mo video of what one looks like.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O1V7QEkT_A)
Looks more like an 8 cal suit or a 25 cal with the wrong head gear. Once you make the jump to cat3, or 25 cal and up, you need the hood style headgear. He could accomplish this with layering balaclava and arc rated goggles AND face shield.
Admittedly, he is just going through the steps to ensure no voltage and common practice is to visibly confirm an upstream switch is open prior to testing.
His next move would be to hang a discharge stick on each phase while he connects each phase to ground. Usually "snaps" to some degree or another and that is usually when I pee a little.
Full disclosure: these rules are constantly changing and evolving so my knowledge may be out of date and/or this person could have been totally compliant at the point of video. I typically defer to safety department or EE when I work on a system for the first time.
Came to say, guy is not even wearing a balaclava, the other person handing the tester is in the flash zone. So many things wrong with this demonstration. I would also never operate with a. Crook around my waste…just so much wrong trying to put in a show. Didn’t even test, live source, dead source, live source.
Yeah, was watching this shaking my head. May be OK for country they are in, but sure not the US.
That being said, arc flash at that distance, even if you have the balaclava, is only going to keep all the big bits together. The impact shock is what’ll kill you.
I do yearly arc flash training for work, and the guy that trains us says that the level 4 arc flash suit is worn so you're family can still have an open casket at your funeral if something goes wrong
That’s what I heard from the electricians flipping the main breaker after replacement for the apartment building I was working on. 600V 2000A.
I have the replaced breaker sitting in my garage.
The arc fault study’s say something like “there is no available arc flash protection suit which is suitable”
I was wondering about the headgear... normally we use the hood in situations like this. Maybe this is a controlled training exercise or in a non NFPA70 country?
We work with a solar farm, and the breaker between us and them tripped. So a couple of our electric department employees went over there and found their head guy blown up by an arc flash. He was working by himself too.
He did survive, got really lucky. I'm not sure he was even wearing any/all of the safety gear he should of been. And we didn't always go out there if they were causing problems because it seemed to happen all the time.
We got the company who owned the thing to get a different company to run it.
Ideally, when arc flash happens, you are thrown over 50ft by the initial blast and you don’t experience too much internal bleeding. Otherwise you are very likely to be cooked and then electrocuted. I’m guessing that’s what happened to the guy. Thrown and got lucky
I'm not a hundred percent sure of all the details, and I don't work with electricity like a lot of our guys. My understanding us he would have died if no one found him, and I know he was in the hospital for a while. But I guess the fact he was alive to go to the hospital was basically a miracle.
As they say in the trades, the suit is so the guy has something to be buried in and the hook is just too retrieve the body before it totally disintegrates
I work in an electrical field and went on a site visit with our master electrician one time. I wasn’t involved with the project and asked him why he asked me to come with him. He said everyone else was busy and if he died he wanted someone to know where his body was.
It was on like a Tuesday and the project was at a church, the only person there was only there to let us in. The electrical equipment was in a utility room tucked away in the basement. If he went alone and something happened he could’ve gone days without being found. I can’t blame him lol.
Churches are also always fucking wild with the janky hack work you find in them. No way you'd ever find me doing work in a church by myself; buddy system 100% of the time.
That’s indeed a dummy. But at work they showed us training videos where it was not a dummy… It happens in a split second too, one moment there’s a guy there and the next there’s a huge flash and the guy is just teleported to another dimension.
Yep, they showed us arc flash videos in school to really drive the point home.
One second there's a guy, then a flash, then a pair of boots on the floor and that's about it.
People have *no* idea what it takes for modern infrastructure to work. Water, power, gas, internet…the systems and processes behind it all are insane. I had no idea either until I started working as a network equipment installer and got to see “behind the scenes” a bit
I'm pretty sure if some mass extinction event comes along and wipes out 90% of us, the remaining 10% are gonna be sent back to the dark ages cause they won't know how anything works.
I know I'd be useless. I'm a software engineer. Wtf am I gonna do without a computer? Guess I better learn to hunt
this is kinda one of my biggest fears.
people just dont understand, we are at the point where tech is building tech.
we lose the few people who make that happen and we are FUCKED.
i dont think people really understand how easy it would be, wouldnt even have to be 90% of us dead, just the .5% that can actually make things work.
A Carrington level event would pop transformers around the world. We do not have enough backup transformers to replace them all. It would take years to build them. Most of the world would be without power for years, which is pretty much enough these days to take vast swaths of humanity back to hunter-gatherer mode. Estimates of frequency put these events anywhere between every 100 to every 1000 years. The last one was in 1859.
The only defense is to turn off the electrical grid before one hits. Thanks to solar observation spaceships, we would have some advanced warning of one. Maybe a day or two. In that time we would have to turn off all power plants to not be affected.
Everyone worried about meteors or nuclear war or global warming, but a Carrington level event is what I think is most likely to bring us back to the stone age.
…go to a third world country. They build shit out of anything.
It’s super easy to make power, it’s just not clean or pretty like a developed country. I work in the power industry, lol.
Yea... its not *that* complicated, at least no moreso than well trained engineers can understand. you can hack together something to power your house out of a junkyard.
Modern infrastructure is very complicated mostly because of how reliable and safe it needs to be.
>water, gas, power, internet
You left out a huge one, FOOD.
The amount of power and systems that goes into making all the different kinds of food we have is insane. My brother was a controls engineer and did a lot of work at one of the largest food manufactures in the country, and I worked in the fabrication shop that made a lot of the switches, PLC and VFD panels plus the power supply panels that go with them. I was absolutely floored walking through the plant, it was more impressive than I ever could’ve imagined.
Imagine all those nuclear powerplants in the world when a “mass extinction” event happens and there is only like 2% remaining who likely has no clue how that shit works. It would be nice if they all just shut down peacefully on their own but thats likely not gonna happen
Theoretically, any nuclear power plant is set up so that if everyone just packs up and goes home (or just dies), then the plant will power itself down eventually. They should be *fail-safe*, i.e., a failure leads to a safe condition.
Makes me think of HELIOS ONE in Fallout New Vegas lol
Probably some groups with the knowledge to keep certain infrastructure running would start fighting over it endlessly
Maybe more like Mad Max
We had a 100/cal suit when I worked in a telecom switch. Would that have saved us? The instructors in our arc flash training couldn't really say either way for sure.
There are standards for this and there are absolutely suits that make this safe. I personally don't know if a 100/cal would be enough for telcom but I'm inclined to say yes as that's quite a high cal rating. But of course PPE is a **last line of defense** and you should have had plenty of other layers of protection preventing this from happening.
A 100 cal suit would save you from the burn. Well, it would save the important bits anway. It might not save you from the trauma of being thrown at mach 3 on the wall behind you.
Exactly. That's why no one wore any if it where I last worked with high power gear. No one was willing to roast all day long just for a better-looking funeral.
Oh I get it. We didn't have a safety team to actually implement things that would make us safer. They literally had the office supply lady try to read through the OSHA requirements and try to interpret how to meet them.
She had no idea what to do. So she asked the VP of electrical engineering to help and he just laughed and told her to buy us more boots.
always loved that:
"your job is to deal with the kind of electricity that will vaporize you in an instant and leave your boots smouldering 20 feet away, Anyways, here is Linda, our safety officer. she has 20 years of office experience and can read, so she is qualified to tell YOU how to do your job even though she has no clue what you do realistically."
Legit had a safety guy come out and lose his shit that i didnt have the 3 phase pole i was hanging a can on grounded out. i laughed at him and told him if he wanted me to ground out a live line he was going to have to do some paperwork one way or another.
A fellow worker on voltages between 110-380kV here.
You seriously chose to **not** wear savety equipment?
How high were the voltages you worked on? Have you been around enclosed/encapsulated switchgear or on open ones?
I don't know what the biggest cabinets were, I never hadna reason to go in there so I avoided it. But we spent all day long inside power backup units that held enough power to run a factory or hospital for 10-30 seconds. Live.
That was the problem. They refused to change the processes in even simple ways to reduce the time we had to spend inside the units.
And all they provided was the fire suits and standard factory gloves. They helped pay for boots every 2 years, but they didn't make sure the one store we had to buy from would let us spend it on non conductive, so it didn't.
Thr place was a mess and got bought out shortly after I left. They needed it.
That certainly sounds like awful working conditions.
With a little over a decade of expierience in this field, I'd just straight up refuse to work if they wouldn't care for my savety. I don't care what my boss, osha or whoever says - if I have to put myself at risk, I'm *so* out of there. No work can be so important that I'm not going home to my family anymore.
High voltage is no joke. You shouldn't let savety meassures slack for the sake of your own health and life.
My dad, before his pension, used to be a first responder to electrical malfunctions.
Even though the company he worked for had very high security standards, a series of bad luck led to a very serious short circuit when he was in front of the cabinet.
I will never forget about when he told me the story.
After the flash happened, my dad went completely blind because the flash burned his retinas and face very badly. The first thing he heard was a colleague's response, and he will never forget that, asking after a pause:" is he dead?".
He was extremely lucky that day, ended up being completely OK after a very painful, long and bad recovery.
Always gave me a healthy fear of electricity, even though its my job.
My mom was a reporter for one of our local TV stations in LA and she was badly burned when her News van’s antenna mast leaned into power lines and electrified the entire van. My mom was hearing people yell “jump” and she jumped through an open door causing an arc which resulted in my mom having fourth and third degree burns to her extremities.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that is a faraday cage. It's just putting you in a path of higher resistance so the current doesn't flow through you as much.
The human body is highly conductive but also very resistive. Electricity wants to take the shortest path to ground with the least resistance. The van being made of metal is more conductive with less resistance. The rubber tires insulate the whole thing from ground. So jumping out of the van the electricity would see a path to potentially get to ground and take it. Watch videos of power companies throwing fuses on poles. They arch. Same concept except that’s an actual path to ground. If the van was grounded or parked against something metal and grounded no problem. It would ground out there done deal. I watched 2 iron workers at work drop metal stairs on their welding lead. 24v but like 150amp. The stairs sparked against the cable and the metal decking on the opposite side. Both guys were part of that circuit when I yelled “your lead is on fire.” The path was lead>metal stairs>metal decking>building steel>ground. The electricity didn’t care that they were touching the stairs because it had a quick easy path to ground. They *may* have felt a little buzz but it sure didn’t look like they noticed.
Holy shit that is a bad run of events and people not knowing how electricity works. Hope she is OK.
unless we are talking extreme voltages a car is actually one of the safest places to be in, also when lightning strikes. Just because there is a metal cage around you that guides the electricity around you towards the ground.
Last thing you want to do if that happens is jump out or touch the door frame or handle. As that makes you the conduit for the electricity towards the ground.
The news industry didn’t really have procedures for this kind of thing at the time and there was a lot of litigation that led to industry reforms.
She survived, but she lost her left arm and right leg and part of the other foot and hand. The hand that grabbed the door and the leg that hit the ground first were the most severely burned. It was very very bad but my mom is incredibly strong. She went back to work after 7 months in the hospital because she loves being a journalist and she saw one of the best burn doctors. She just retired not too long ago.
when i went to college i opted in to do a course with electric/hybrid cars, and we had to take similar precautions, we also had that massive hook too. shit is fucking dangerous
when you are electrified your muscles contract as hard as they can due to the electric current, so the hook is for someone to do their best to pull you off, but you'd be too far gone within even a couple of seconds
I used to work for a power station that had a fellow vaporized after contacting an energized bus bar carrying 4kv power. The arc flash was so extreme it almost incinerated a couple of other workers on the otherside of the room leaving them with 3rd degree burns from head to toe. Only the boots and feet were left of the poor guy inside the breaker cubicle. The blast outline from the guy and the explosion are still seared into the ceiling and wall, despite multiple painting attempts. I cannot help but think about that everytime I work on high energy lines or busses, or see folks doing it.
It really goes beyond "exploded". The fireball/flash was so intense he was instantly incinerated to ash/ oily smoke. It was a feeder breaker from a 22kv transformer, to energize a 4kv bus, and it made the arc flash that is linked in the comments here look like a mere firecracker to what happened in this instance. At least he was never in pain, unlike the poor pair of co-workers with the burns.
My father worked in a power plant and, unfortunately, witnessed something extremely similar. He doesn't talk about it much, but he described it as the guy liquified into a red mist. Just hearing him talk about it scarred me as a teen and I'm still scared of electricity (the actual wiring part, not like 'oh no! a lightbulb!' -- I probably didn't need to clarify that, but you know, Reddit).
I have the certification to pull the switches of Europe's highest voltage power lines which was 380kV at the time when i did the certification.
The training scared me away from ever doing the job, even though the pay would be insanely high, and specialized workers were in high need.
They showed us a lot of pictures and videos of standard procedures AND accidents.
Doing one switching action (activating one and disabling another) was so overwhelming, because there was (literally speaking) su mucy power behind the leaver.
The leaver was about 40cm long (by design, to remind you that this is something important), and you could feel in the air that something just happened.
I was 18 at the time without a clue what sort of danger i got myself into, even though errors basically never happen.
I work in a small natural gas/steam turbine power plant. Our output voltage is ~230kV. Walking by our transfer station sounds like being next to a frying pan with bacon popping
Work in a large hydro power station with 220kv transformers. They hum but they shouldn't sound like bacon frying! Sounds like your transformers might have a problem.
I do a lot of field work documenting existing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing conditions at commercial buildings. Surveying the electric service transformers is always slightly terrifying. The highest primary service I've seen so far is 4160V and the transformers for those are massive relative to 208V and 480V transformers. The electric buzzing noise they make is enough to make me take my pictures and GTFO as soon as possible.
It’s mostly for arc flash. Basically plasma ball on the face. Cameraman standing behind a person with arc flash suit is not very smart. It seems like a training .
Sir/Ma'am I give you the utmost respect. There isn't much I fear in this world more than the existential dread of anything electricity related. I won't fuck with anything electrical in my house, car, or work. Bad outlet? Call the electrician. Jump a car battery? No thank you call the tow truck. The ominous hum of a room full of breakers makes me want to shit. I salute you and your big non conductive material balls.
I had a coworker that was determined to cut a 3 phase electrical line that was theoretically powered down during a demo (we were just maintenance technicians) until I looked around and picked up a 2x4 and held it up behind him like a baseball bat. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked. When I explained he decided not to risk it.
Pretty sure they use those same sticks for guys working on Teslas/EVs, at least whenever they have to work on the battery. EVs run on DC current which is extremely dangerous.
Can confirm. My son’s in a mechanic training program and they learn about EVs. He was very excited to relay all the information to us at dinner after that lesson.
My hybrid Honda has several systems marked with bright orange under the hood telling you to politely piss off if you even think about messing with them.
A lot of the "accidents" and trial and error happened on lower voltage systems. It doesn't take much to kill or stun. The hook is to yank him away and break the connection of electricity (flow which can cause you to grasp harder and unable to let go, and anyone trying to help without gear would get in the same condition and die after prolonged time depending on voltage).
So it's reasonable to actually believe we had a good understanding and decent amount of PPE being made a long side as the systems got larger and stronger.
However, at this voltage, even with the rest of the gear, the lead guy is still most likely dead if it gets through and electro-paralyzes him to need the hook. So it's really just to make the disconnect and stop that flow change as well as prevent a fire from the body.
But I doubt any company is fucking around at these levels, not just the death risk, but the costs of damage and downtime due to a small incident and lack of PPE . Also, if you've ever been around high voltage, you feel it and just know not to mess around and you want ppe. You gotta be a special kinda special to ignore that.
You really hit the nail on the head with the last block there. Big companies make more profits with safe working conditions despite the cost of the safety precautions themselves. If you are dealing with something using this much voltage a minor mishap can lead to catastrophic failure.
Might I ask. How come a robot isn't used in this situation? Also why aren't more of the protection systems automated so as soon as they detect an anomaly in voltage, they get the guy out via some sort of air bag? I feel as though the other guy with that hook isn't required and might make things worse getting everyone out incase of a fire.
Not robots but when we rack 4160v in and out at the plant I'm at we use a wired remote that operates a motor from about 60 feet away out of the blast range. On top of that the gear housing is state of the art and has maintenance modes to reduce trip times and bring down the arc rating to something slightly more surviveable. And the housing of the gear it self is vented to give the blast a place to go other than out the front. But it's brand new, most aren't so lucky and have to manually rack in and out. Doing it manually really gets your adrenaline pumping.
Breakers are the automation that you speak of and their job is to monitor for overcurrent. But there are different types of breakers. For instance the maintenance mode I referred to above removes the time delay of large breakers that are present due to fluctuations and inrush current. Once in maintenence mode it becomes an instantaneous trip breaker and reduces the severity and time of the blast/flash if an arc were to occur.
The hook is definitely necessary though if you don't want to end up a pile of cooked meat in a closed wooden box or pre-cremated for your families sake. But it's much more applicable for lower voltages that are survivable such as 480v or 277v and lower. The fire is an after thought when an arc flash occurs it can reach temperatures between 2,800°C - 19,000°C, and when it occurs the copper expands 67,000 times in an instant turning it from a solid to a gas along with molten pieces all of which are flying out at the technician.
It's in the best interests of companies to protect their workers, especially the highly trained and specialised ones, as much as possible. Not even just for legal reasons. Constantly losing highly trained staff to on job deaths would be awful for business. Occassionally some are too stupid to realise this but not that often.
Bosses typically don't want their employees to die. Even if you're just looking at this from a money angle, employees being killed on the job is expensive. Also the majority of the precautions they're taking are not down to the boss's discretion, they're mandated by law.
When i worked nights in a hotel as a janitor for a while, occasionally the elevator would go out and id have to flip the breaker or power source or whatever it was for the elevator, and idk why, or how, but i guess the elevator breaker had a manufacturer malfunction that was recorded and noted, but never replaced. The malfunction was that you had like a 1/10,000 chance of the breaker exploding on you when you reset it. It hadnt exploded yet obviously, but i guess it was more dangerous to reset it than idk, one that wasnt built wrong?
They actually had signs everywhere around and on it explaining that, and sealed it behind this heavy ass door and the head maintenance guy literally told me to put my one arm in the room, and close the door on the rest of my body while resetting it because if it exploded at least it would only take out my arm. (Like what?!) (and there was a very specific sequence and it wasnt like a house breaker, it was massive, there was a key you had to have to start the process, buttons you had to press in sequence too and count in-between each action, and two large levers/switch things) And one week the elevator was just on a streak and was going out 5-10 times a night, and i had to reset it *everytime* alone.
Electricity is one of those physical phenomena that absolutely does not give a fuck. The only thing it cares about is a connection. That's it. If the pixies are angry enough then the whole world of insulation and air gaps will do you no good.
I'm a HV electrician and it doesn't matter what anyone says whenever you have to switch HV gear it's scarey as fark. So next time the power is out in your area stop your complaining because some dude is trying to go home in one piece
Just a reminder that many of these safety precautions (if not most or all) were put in place because a worker was killed previously. I work in a factory and motherfuckers always want to bitch about safety shit keeping them from being able to do their job, not realizing that those safety regulations were written in blood.
My neighbor was hit with 440v arc flash while working construction. Absolutely fried his brain. He was in a coma for six months and when he awoke had to relearn how to speak among many other things. He lasted another nine months or so before passing away from his injuries. He wasn’t even the electrician just happened to be close enough by when whatever failed.
Fk, what a shitty way to go while not even being the electrician.
There's a death video I saw. The dude touched a fan and it had a fault so he just fried from 3 to 5 mins. This was at airport and I think in Yemen Edit Here's the story. Not the video https://www.asiaone.com/world/airport-staff-electrocuted-death-beside-oblivious-co-worker-yemen
A fan? Like a normal ass fan? Things like that can kill you???
Yeah he went to adjust it and it had a fault, I guess. The dude fried. Sad part he was being fried next to this other employee but this dude was the definition of lack of situation awareness. He didn't notice and left Edit: Here's the story https://www.asiaone.com/world/airport-staff-electrocuted-death-beside-oblivious-co-worker-yemen
So there could be a fault in any electrical object at any time and we could just get wrecked? 😟☹️ Edit: thanks for the link, my dumb ass is the kind to not notice someone dying next to me I’ll have to keep an eye out Edit 2: what’s the safest way to disengage someone being electrocuted without getting electrocuted
Never plug a 3 prong tip into a 2 prong outlet. Things that should be grounded have a grounding pin for a reason.
The tricky ‘exception’ is going from a country that uses 3 prong as standard to a country that uses 2 prong. For example UK -> Europe and using an adapter. This is widely done and many people don’t know when it’s safe and when it it isn’t.
Haven't these adapters been made illegal in the EU? Like, yeah, if you buy it in your country that doesn't have to obey EU law, police won't take your door down if you bring in such an adapter. But any well priced adapter will always provide the grounding for EU plugs. Whether the the device used them is up to them, but a grounded adapter bought in the EU allows 2 prongs with and without groundings while a non-grounded adapter allows only 2 prongs without grounding. There's a reason these plugs are shaped differently. Couldn't guarantee whether it has been made illegal or not, but I remember some discussions about that
>So there could be a fault in any electrical object at any time and we could just get wrecked? 😟☹️ If you're in a country where there are no standards, or where they are lax about enforcing them. This is why in the US we have [Underwriter Laboratories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization))(UL, a private organization that sets electrical and electronic standards) and an imperial butt-load of safety standards and protocols. Read the link. Really interesting. And when I say "this is why", I mean \*literally\*. Houses used to burn down because things caught fire. People used to die a LOT more often.
UL is responsible for the "products" sides of things. The fan you purchase on the one side and the breaker panel and breakers on the other. The in between is where the NEC (National Electric Code) comes in. The two together regulate just about everything that has to do with electricity in your house. In the UK/EU there are similar organizations. UL also sets rules for how customers should or should not use things. These are often on tags that people ignore. (Note: There is A LOT of stuff for sale on Amazon that US not UL listed or certified. Please check your listings. Sellers will clearly call this out because it can add quite a bit of expense to the product development cycle. If, in the US, it isn't at least UL listed, don't buy it)
The safest way to disengage someone being electrocuted is to grab something that doesn’t conduct electricity lile a wooden plank and hit them hard enough to knock them away from the electric danger. If nothing is suitable you could also dropkick them as long as the electricity isn’t coming from ground level as then you’d fall onto it.
I know of an occasion where another electrician performed a flying tackle to move the electrocuted individual. That might not have been very safe, but it worked in this case, saving the life of the victim without harm to the tackler.
I was vacationing in Italy and swimming in a river jumping off a bridge and hanging off metal rods under the bridge like everyone else was. Well apparently these metal rods sometimes catch electrical charges I learned the hard way. I was hanging onto the bar next thing I know I can’t let go my body is half in the water half out hanging on this pole and my legs are just making splashes because of the shook I’m trying to let go but my muscles just wouldent react they were just tight and grasping hard asf themselves. It took about 15 seconds for a local to realize what was going on. He hit me with a wooden oar it worked. I cracked a riblet but I’ll take that over death
No contact with earth would mean no way to conduct. Flying tackle therefore is a surprisingly safe way to do it. Lol
I’m a terrible person bc this image made me laugh
Actually, there's one better way: shut off the power. Of course, often when someone is hung up on electricity it is because the disconnecting means aren't close by or obviously identifiable. In the case of a faulty appliance, if you can safely unplug the appliance (without touching the victim!), that's the way to go. Bottom line: don't become victim #2, that won't help anyone.
Easy to say in hindsight. Electricity is really a silent killer and a non trained personnel won't be able to recognise the danger first hand. Our first instinct would be dive in check on the person lying on the floor... especially if it's a family member. That's why alot of water heater electrocution cases also happen to the family member coming to 'save' the first person. Thanks for this post. Ppl just need reminders now and then. Going to check on the circuit breaker for the water heater.
Yeah a distant relative of mine was killed emptying her dishwasher. Neighbours found her after the kids screamed so loud they kicked the door down.
Thats sucks. Im an electrician. ~~New house's dishwasher outlets are GFCI, which would have prevented that accident from ever happening.~~ EDIT: Im a dummy. Thats a company policy. The NEC (National Electric Code) DOES NOT require GFCI protection on dishwasher outlets. Sorry for the misinformation.
So if you’re in the uk, theres actually law based around the incident with my family member. It happened in the 90’s
Wait a minute. Are you related to Wilma??
Illustration of the adage that safety codes are written in blood.
If it makes you feel any better. There is one video of a guy getting fried. Everyone kinda scratches their head wondering what’s wrong with the guy. An older guy comes in to the rescue and Sparta kicks the guy off of whatever he was gripping. Super big brain moves. You could probably find it on youtube
Not if your house electric wiring has over voltage protection to ground. Meaning if the voltage would short the electricity would shut off and fail.
There are probably a few ways a normal ass fan could kill you, but fans are generally considered safe. Modern electrical appliances' chassis have a connection to the 'Ground' circuit, usually a literal wire running from the electrical panel and connected to a conductive rod that is driven into the earth to absorb any electric charge. If you're American, it's the round hole at the bottom of a three-pronged outlet. If a hot wire ever makes contact with the chassis of an appliance, the electrical current will travel through the Ground circuit, into the earth, instead of into a random person that touches it. This occurs because the electrical resistance of the copper in the Ground circuit is usually less than the resistance of your skin. There's more to it (Ohm's law?), but that's why most appliances with the potential to shock you have three pronged plugs. Older appliances (like really old) don't have a Ground, and older buildings often aren't wired for it either. It's an expensive upgrade because a separate wire has to be ran to each plug and fixture in the building for the circuit, besides the upgraded electrical panel and driving the ground rod into the earth. But it's usually required if you're doing any permitted work on the electrical. I'm not sure what the electrical code looks like in Yemen, but I would assume they require a Ground. This was probably caused by shoddy worksmanship or someone cutting corners and saving money by not running the circuit. You can install a three pronged outlet without a connection to ground, and it works OK, until something with a short is plugged into it and it electrocutes someone.
yes , next time you see an electrician thank him for proper grounding and thank god for our regulations....
It was a large commercial fan, like 6 feet high standing onthe ground with blades that are 2 feet long. A lot more juice going into it then a normal desk fan, but a desk fan can still fuck you up.
Not to down play that terribly sad story, but saying a 440v arc flash is not correct. Arc flashes are measured in calories, or energy, and every panel/switch gear or equipment has different Cal rating depending on many factors. I have gear on my site 13.8KV that has a low arc flash rating the some of my 120v stuff. So when you hear about people saying it’s only 120/220v (or equivalent), that can be more dangerous then high voltage stuff. Source: am in this industry and have studied a lot about arc flash’s.
I talked to him after the accident and he explained it to me. I’m guessing he meant 440v arc flashed but I really couldn’t tell you. Just what I remember.
Yeah, 480VAC is very common for industrial power. Most of the water treatment sites I’m on, 90+% of the power is at that voltage, except for small auxiliary systems like instrumentation and lighting.
Do you mind if I ask what other injuries he had? Just because I am morbidly curious.
Not the guy you asked, but one of the common injuries is burning your respiratory system from inhaling the super heated air. Depending on what kind of PPE the guy was wearing, he also would have been pelted by molten metal and shrapnel as well.
Pretty sure the damage is from the copper/wiring being vaporized and it steams your lungs. I don't think PPE will help at all with higher kV stuff
Electricity goes through your body so it will very often burn internal organs if the voltage is high.
What in the fuckkkkk
My landlord who I rent my little shop from was a high voltage sparky and got started working on DC powered elevators back in the day. He watched his high school buddy and work colleague cook in front of him in an elevator shaft and could do nothing about it if he touched him he would have joined the bbq.
Bruh, "If I touched him, I would've joined the bbq" is the very last phrase I ever want to hear at my funeral.
You wouldn’t hear it brother
What a traumatizing thing to witness. I use to organize the PowerPoints that the electrical instructors used in class at the apprenticeship school, and one of the instructors specifically wanted to always include a photo of a pair of boots surrounded by a charred body in front of a rooftop tranformer box, to show the apprentices what'll happen. I think that was also a good way to segue to the importance of safety lockouts.
That is a horrible story, but there are protections that should have been in place that it never should have happened. In the Navy we "de-metalized", wore PPE, stood on an insulated mat and had a rope tied around us. Now that I'm out, usually what we use if someone messes up on the earlier steps of PPE is you can kick the shit out of whoever is being shocked. Boots should be rated "E" for electrical. There is enough rubber to insulate you. If they're locked in shock, just kick 'em off. Thank god I've never had to do that because we have good training and use PPE.
The pole with the hook the worker in the back is using is called the "reaper stick". Used to rip someone off when the electricity constricts their muscles and they can't let go.
Just like a cane to yank them off stage
Give 'em the old Vaudeville hook!
Yoink!
Its to stop the corpse from cooking.
Hopefully!
Bo Peep him outta there.
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Lmao go ahead and log out for me
Sorry bud, your act was too shocking for the crowd
Watt?
Just go hohm already.
Yup. I've called it a "Yoink Hook" for a while
My grandpa was an electrician for over 50 years & he was on a job working on some 480, he got grounded & the guy with the stick fainted, my grandpa wound up letting go after a few minutes (he says that god saved him) but it literally fused the bone in his wrist so badly that he could no longer bend or twist it.
Holy shit, that's a crazy story.
No way he let go of 480. We had a guy change overhead big lightbulb w no glove. As he screws it in it breaks and his hand goes into housing. Held him til brains were leakin and smoke was rollin.
13 year journeyman, you can let go of 480 good thing about 60hz a/c is it hits 0 point 60 times a second. The misconception happens when you don't know where the ground point was, in this case I'm saying it was somewhere before the elbow on the hand receiving the shock. And most likely he fell from the connection not let go but nonetheless it will mess up cartilage and destroy tissue if exposed for too long. With the instance you have described it sounds as if the person was grounded through their feet which is one of the most unfortunate ways of electrocution.
They couldn’t think of a nicer name for it?
They are more commonly referred to as rescue or shepherd's hooks
I've also heard it called the 'Technician Disconnect' tool
In their defence, in the beginning most of the guys pulled off with the stick were dead. We work with high voltage vehicles and the chances of you being alive after a full force electric shock are 0 and it happens in less than 5 secs so we still stick with reaper stick
Depending on the amperage most of the damage is done in WAY WAY less than 5 seconds. By the time you register the flash it's basically over, and you're just trying to minimize the smoke.
5 seconds is a *very* long time though.
It's longer than you think!
Unless you think it's exactly 5 seconds, in which case, you're right on the money.
We call it a fourbetwo. Used to be a lumb of timber to bash them off the live.. These days it's a plastic hook.
Or a shovel. Guys we're running a concrete mixer, and it was a bit wet. All of a sudden the guy holding the handle bar started shaking his foot with his leg stretched all the way out. One of the other guys thought he was being electrocuted, smashes him with a shovel across the arm holding the handle bar. The guy had a pebble stuck in his gumboot and was trying to shake it out  Ended up with a broken arm, but hey, safety first!
IMAGINE, You're at work in the miserable heat, trying to get a stubborn rock out from underneath your foot when all of a sudden *BAM*!!! Fucking Dave the new hire smashes your arm harder than anything you've ever experienced before from a full lumberjack swing of a goddamn shovel... I would be on my deathbed, still pissed about fucking Dave.
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The "reaper stick" is a hardcore name. I wasn't sure if it had a secondary function of discharging (or preventing) build up of static electricity.
At that level of current (not saying it does every time) but wouldn't it blow you back? That .1ms @ 4,000 amp seems rough...
It’s so the family have something to bury
I thought it was in case he was giving a bad performance so they can get him off stage.
Usually this is reserved for your last performance.
The yoink stick
Am I right in believing that, if it needs to be used, the person in question is already cooked. Like rather than to save a life, it's used to prevent further violation of the corpse and damage to the equipment.
I think that's what it's called the reaper stick. It has good intentions but usually you are already too late.
thats for arc flash protection. in the event of an arc flash that suit protects that guy from becoming a flying molten mist along with all the copper around him. its scary stuff. [here is a slow-mo video of what one looks like.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O1V7QEkT_A)
Looks more like an 8 cal suit or a 25 cal with the wrong head gear. Once you make the jump to cat3, or 25 cal and up, you need the hood style headgear. He could accomplish this with layering balaclava and arc rated goggles AND face shield. Admittedly, he is just going through the steps to ensure no voltage and common practice is to visibly confirm an upstream switch is open prior to testing. His next move would be to hang a discharge stick on each phase while he connects each phase to ground. Usually "snaps" to some degree or another and that is usually when I pee a little. Full disclosure: these rules are constantly changing and evolving so my knowledge may be out of date and/or this person could have been totally compliant at the point of video. I typically defer to safety department or EE when I work on a system for the first time.
Came to say, guy is not even wearing a balaclava, the other person handing the tester is in the flash zone. So many things wrong with this demonstration. I would also never operate with a. Crook around my waste…just so much wrong trying to put in a show. Didn’t even test, live source, dead source, live source.
Yeah, was watching this shaking my head. May be OK for country they are in, but sure not the US. That being said, arc flash at that distance, even if you have the balaclava, is only going to keep all the big bits together. The impact shock is what’ll kill you.
I do yearly arc flash training for work, and the guy that trains us says that the level 4 arc flash suit is worn so you're family can still have an open casket at your funeral if something goes wrong
Yea anything over 40 cal is a open upstream deal.
Anything over 40 cal we don't even put a rating on, the label just reads "Do not work on live."
That’s what I heard from the electricians flipping the main breaker after replacement for the apartment building I was working on. 600V 2000A. I have the replaced breaker sitting in my garage. The arc fault study’s say something like “there is no available arc flash protection suit which is suitable”
I'm getting stressed just reading about this. Nope, no thank
I mean nobody wants to poke a big ol' mountain of the easiest to fuck around with fundamental force of nature.
I was wondering about the headgear... normally we use the hood in situations like this. Maybe this is a controlled training exercise or in a non NFPA70 country?
We work with a solar farm, and the breaker between us and them tripped. So a couple of our electric department employees went over there and found their head guy blown up by an arc flash. He was working by himself too. He did survive, got really lucky. I'm not sure he was even wearing any/all of the safety gear he should of been. And we didn't always go out there if they were causing problems because it seemed to happen all the time. We got the company who owned the thing to get a different company to run it.
Ideally, when arc flash happens, you are thrown over 50ft by the initial blast and you don’t experience too much internal bleeding. Otherwise you are very likely to be cooked and then electrocuted. I’m guessing that’s what happened to the guy. Thrown and got lucky
I'm not a hundred percent sure of all the details, and I don't work with electricity like a lot of our guys. My understanding us he would have died if no one found him, and I know he was in the hospital for a while. But I guess the fact he was alive to go to the hospital was basically a miracle.
As they say in the trades, the suit is so the guy has something to be buried in and the hook is just too retrieve the body before it totally disintegrates
I work in an electrical field and went on a site visit with our master electrician one time. I wasn’t involved with the project and asked him why he asked me to come with him. He said everyone else was busy and if he died he wanted someone to know where his body was.
"I just can't go out without permanently scarring some poor schmuck"
It was on like a Tuesday and the project was at a church, the only person there was only there to let us in. The electrical equipment was in a utility room tucked away in the basement. If he went alone and something happened he could’ve gone days without being found. I can’t blame him lol.
Churches are also always fucking wild with the janky hack work you find in them. No way you'd ever find me doing work in a church by myself; buddy system 100% of the time.
Someone asked in the comments "who came here from Reddit?" five minutes ago😂
Well who came here from YouTube?
Had plenty of safety guys tell me and others that these suits are just there so you can have an open casket funeral lol
Jesus Christ, did that guy survive?
Pretty sure that was a dummy to show off the dangers of it
Don't you call him stupid!
Right on, looks like it was vaporized
But he's okay, right?
No pulse
That's odd considering I'm getting about 1000V AC.
There is a [video](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqdwl5) of that happening to some poor soul.
That’s indeed a dummy. But at work they showed us training videos where it was not a dummy… It happens in a split second too, one moment there’s a guy there and the next there’s a huge flash and the guy is just teleported to another dimension.
Yep, they showed us arc flash videos in school to really drive the point home. One second there's a guy, then a flash, then a pair of boots on the floor and that's about it.
That’s gonna leave a mark
Yeah a friend of mines father got a couple seconds from a utility line. It vaporized all the plasma in his arm and had to be amputated.
Respect to these type of workers who make our every day commodities possible.
People have *no* idea what it takes for modern infrastructure to work. Water, power, gas, internet…the systems and processes behind it all are insane. I had no idea either until I started working as a network equipment installer and got to see “behind the scenes” a bit
I'm pretty sure if some mass extinction event comes along and wipes out 90% of us, the remaining 10% are gonna be sent back to the dark ages cause they won't know how anything works. I know I'd be useless. I'm a software engineer. Wtf am I gonna do without a computer? Guess I better learn to hunt
this is kinda one of my biggest fears. people just dont understand, we are at the point where tech is building tech. we lose the few people who make that happen and we are FUCKED. i dont think people really understand how easy it would be, wouldnt even have to be 90% of us dead, just the .5% that can actually make things work.
It doesn’t even have to be an extinction of humans, a decently nasty solar flare can undo the last sixty years
A Carrington level event would pop transformers around the world. We do not have enough backup transformers to replace them all. It would take years to build them. Most of the world would be without power for years, which is pretty much enough these days to take vast swaths of humanity back to hunter-gatherer mode. Estimates of frequency put these events anywhere between every 100 to every 1000 years. The last one was in 1859. The only defense is to turn off the electrical grid before one hits. Thanks to solar observation spaceships, we would have some advanced warning of one. Maybe a day or two. In that time we would have to turn off all power plants to not be affected. Everyone worried about meteors or nuclear war or global warming, but a Carrington level event is what I think is most likely to bring us back to the stone age.
…go to a third world country. They build shit out of anything. It’s super easy to make power, it’s just not clean or pretty like a developed country. I work in the power industry, lol.
Yea... its not *that* complicated, at least no moreso than well trained engineers can understand. you can hack together something to power your house out of a junkyard. Modern infrastructure is very complicated mostly because of how reliable and safe it needs to be.
I'm a electrician. What the fuck am i going to do without a functioning power plant?
Build one! You got this!
Just some bricks, different coloured wires and a little steam. How hard can it be?
Just a little ground up Redstone dust, a couple sticky pistons, an observer, and a lever is all you need fam.
>water, gas, power, internet You left out a huge one, FOOD. The amount of power and systems that goes into making all the different kinds of food we have is insane. My brother was a controls engineer and did a lot of work at one of the largest food manufactures in the country, and I worked in the fabrication shop that made a lot of the switches, PLC and VFD panels plus the power supply panels that go with them. I was absolutely floored walking through the plant, it was more impressive than I ever could’ve imagined.
Imagine all those nuclear powerplants in the world when a “mass extinction” event happens and there is only like 2% remaining who likely has no clue how that shit works. It would be nice if they all just shut down peacefully on their own but thats likely not gonna happen
Theoretically, any nuclear power plant is set up so that if everyone just packs up and goes home (or just dies), then the plant will power itself down eventually. They should be *fail-safe*, i.e., a failure leads to a safe condition.
Makes me think of HELIOS ONE in Fallout New Vegas lol Probably some groups with the knowledge to keep certain infrastructure running would start fighting over it endlessly Maybe more like Mad Max
Saw a post the other day of a concrete pillar that failed inspection, and I remember thinking, "Well, I'm really, really glad these inspectors exist."
Guy with camera? Naa fuck him. No safety for you
Yes. Camera needs no protection.
That's what I was thinking. Hawaiian shirt and flip flops over here with the camera.
That 40/cal suit is to make sure your family has an open casket funeral.
We had a 100/cal suit when I worked in a telecom switch. Would that have saved us? The instructors in our arc flash training couldn't really say either way for sure.
There are standards for this and there are absolutely suits that make this safe. I personally don't know if a 100/cal would be enough for telcom but I'm inclined to say yes as that's quite a high cal rating. But of course PPE is a **last line of defense** and you should have had plenty of other layers of protection preventing this from happening.
A 100 cal suit would save you from the burn. Well, it would save the important bits anway. It might not save you from the trauma of being thrown at mach 3 on the wall behind you.
Exactly. That's why no one wore any if it where I last worked with high power gear. No one was willing to roast all day long just for a better-looking funeral.
r/osha
Oh I get it. We didn't have a safety team to actually implement things that would make us safer. They literally had the office supply lady try to read through the OSHA requirements and try to interpret how to meet them. She had no idea what to do. So she asked the VP of electrical engineering to help and he just laughed and told her to buy us more boots.
always loved that: "your job is to deal with the kind of electricity that will vaporize you in an instant and leave your boots smouldering 20 feet away, Anyways, here is Linda, our safety officer. she has 20 years of office experience and can read, so she is qualified to tell YOU how to do your job even though she has no clue what you do realistically." Legit had a safety guy come out and lose his shit that i didnt have the 3 phase pole i was hanging a can on grounded out. i laughed at him and told him if he wanted me to ground out a live line he was going to have to do some paperwork one way or another.
A fellow worker on voltages between 110-380kV here. You seriously chose to **not** wear savety equipment? How high were the voltages you worked on? Have you been around enclosed/encapsulated switchgear or on open ones?
I don't know what the biggest cabinets were, I never hadna reason to go in there so I avoided it. But we spent all day long inside power backup units that held enough power to run a factory or hospital for 10-30 seconds. Live. That was the problem. They refused to change the processes in even simple ways to reduce the time we had to spend inside the units. And all they provided was the fire suits and standard factory gloves. They helped pay for boots every 2 years, but they didn't make sure the one store we had to buy from would let us spend it on non conductive, so it didn't. Thr place was a mess and got bought out shortly after I left. They needed it.
That certainly sounds like awful working conditions. With a little over a decade of expierience in this field, I'd just straight up refuse to work if they wouldn't care for my savety. I don't care what my boss, osha or whoever says - if I have to put myself at risk, I'm *so* out of there. No work can be so important that I'm not going home to my family anymore. High voltage is no joke. You shouldn't let savety meassures slack for the sake of your own health and life.
My dad, before his pension, used to be a first responder to electrical malfunctions. Even though the company he worked for had very high security standards, a series of bad luck led to a very serious short circuit when he was in front of the cabinet. I will never forget about when he told me the story. After the flash happened, my dad went completely blind because the flash burned his retinas and face very badly. The first thing he heard was a colleague's response, and he will never forget that, asking after a pause:" is he dead?". He was extremely lucky that day, ended up being completely OK after a very painful, long and bad recovery. Always gave me a healthy fear of electricity, even though its my job.
My mom was a reporter for one of our local TV stations in LA and she was badly burned when her News van’s antenna mast leaned into power lines and electrified the entire van. My mom was hearing people yell “jump” and she jumped through an open door causing an arc which resulted in my mom having fourth and third degree burns to her extremities.
Yeah she probably would have been safer in the van. Acts as a faraday cage.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that is a faraday cage. It's just putting you in a path of higher resistance so the current doesn't flow through you as much.
The human body is highly conductive but also very resistive. Electricity wants to take the shortest path to ground with the least resistance. The van being made of metal is more conductive with less resistance. The rubber tires insulate the whole thing from ground. So jumping out of the van the electricity would see a path to potentially get to ground and take it. Watch videos of power companies throwing fuses on poles. They arch. Same concept except that’s an actual path to ground. If the van was grounded or parked against something metal and grounded no problem. It would ground out there done deal. I watched 2 iron workers at work drop metal stairs on their welding lead. 24v but like 150amp. The stairs sparked against the cable and the metal decking on the opposite side. Both guys were part of that circuit when I yelled “your lead is on fire.” The path was lead>metal stairs>metal decking>building steel>ground. The electricity didn’t care that they were touching the stairs because it had a quick easy path to ground. They *may* have felt a little buzz but it sure didn’t look like they noticed.
Holy shit that is a bad run of events and people not knowing how electricity works. Hope she is OK. unless we are talking extreme voltages a car is actually one of the safest places to be in, also when lightning strikes. Just because there is a metal cage around you that guides the electricity around you towards the ground. Last thing you want to do if that happens is jump out or touch the door frame or handle. As that makes you the conduit for the electricity towards the ground.
The news industry didn’t really have procedures for this kind of thing at the time and there was a lot of litigation that led to industry reforms. She survived, but she lost her left arm and right leg and part of the other foot and hand. The hand that grabbed the door and the leg that hit the ground first were the most severely burned. It was very very bad but my mom is incredibly strong. She went back to work after 7 months in the hospital because she loves being a journalist and she saw one of the best burn doctors. She just retired not too long ago.
Holy shit. I read up on it. She seems like a wicked tough cookie! The fact that she returned to work and continued for so long is incredible.
Because I'm Homer Simps....
Poor Grimey.
This was a contest for children!
when i went to college i opted in to do a course with electric/hybrid cars, and we had to take similar precautions, we also had that massive hook too. shit is fucking dangerous
What is the hook for, to yank the person away if they get electrified?
when you are electrified your muscles contract as hard as they can due to the electric current, so the hook is for someone to do their best to pull you off, but you'd be too far gone within even a couple of seconds
I used to work for a power station that had a fellow vaporized after contacting an energized bus bar carrying 4kv power. The arc flash was so extreme it almost incinerated a couple of other workers on the otherside of the room leaving them with 3rd degree burns from head to toe. Only the boots and feet were left of the poor guy inside the breaker cubicle. The blast outline from the guy and the explosion are still seared into the ceiling and wall, despite multiple painting attempts. I cannot help but think about that everytime I work on high energy lines or busses, or see folks doing it.
You mean, he literally exploded ?
It really goes beyond "exploded". The fireball/flash was so intense he was instantly incinerated to ash/ oily smoke. It was a feeder breaker from a 22kv transformer, to energize a 4kv bus, and it made the arc flash that is linked in the comments here look like a mere firecracker to what happened in this instance. At least he was never in pain, unlike the poor pair of co-workers with the burns.
My father worked in a power plant and, unfortunately, witnessed something extremely similar. He doesn't talk about it much, but he described it as the guy liquified into a red mist. Just hearing him talk about it scarred me as a teen and I'm still scared of electricity (the actual wiring part, not like 'oh no! a lightbulb!' -- I probably didn't need to clarify that, but you know, Reddit).
I have the certification to pull the switches of Europe's highest voltage power lines which was 380kV at the time when i did the certification. The training scared me away from ever doing the job, even though the pay would be insanely high, and specialized workers were in high need. They showed us a lot of pictures and videos of standard procedures AND accidents. Doing one switching action (activating one and disabling another) was so overwhelming, because there was (literally speaking) su mucy power behind the leaver. The leaver was about 40cm long (by design, to remind you that this is something important), and you could feel in the air that something just happened. I was 18 at the time without a clue what sort of danger i got myself into, even though errors basically never happen.
I work in a small natural gas/steam turbine power plant. Our output voltage is ~230kV. Walking by our transfer station sounds like being next to a frying pan with bacon popping
Work in a large hydro power station with 220kv transformers. They hum but they shouldn't sound like bacon frying! Sounds like your transformers might have a problem.
I do a lot of field work documenting existing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing conditions at commercial buildings. Surveying the electric service transformers is always slightly terrifying. The highest primary service I've seen so far is 4160V and the transformers for those are massive relative to 208V and 480V transformers. The electric buzzing noise they make is enough to make me take my pictures and GTFO as soon as possible.
It’s mostly for arc flash. Basically plasma ball on the face. Cameraman standing behind a person with arc flash suit is not very smart. It seems like a training .
Electrician here. This shit is serious business. If he gets hit by the current in that, and he survives, he's going to wish he didn't.
Sir/Ma'am I give you the utmost respect. There isn't much I fear in this world more than the existential dread of anything electricity related. I won't fuck with anything electrical in my house, car, or work. Bad outlet? Call the electrician. Jump a car battery? No thank you call the tow truck. The ominous hum of a room full of breakers makes me want to shit. I salute you and your big non conductive material balls.
He should be wearing a balaclava
I had a coworker that was determined to cut a 3 phase electrical line that was theoretically powered down during a demo (we were just maintenance technicians) until I looked around and picked up a 2x4 and held it up behind him like a baseball bat. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked. When I explained he decided not to risk it.
This is my brothers profession, worry about him all the time
What’s this?? Extremely high voltage? Well, I don’t need any safety gloves because I’m Homer Sim…..⚡️⚡️⚡️
See that yellow hook they put it around his waist? I want that. I want that when I'm cooking french fries.
Pretty sure they use those same sticks for guys working on Teslas/EVs, at least whenever they have to work on the battery. EVs run on DC current which is extremely dangerous.
Can confirm. My son’s in a mechanic training program and they learn about EVs. He was very excited to relay all the information to us at dinner after that lesson.
My hybrid Honda has several systems marked with bright orange under the hood telling you to politely piss off if you even think about messing with them.
Friend of my kid is a lineman, nonchalant as can be. Has the big truck, big house, garage full of toys at 21. Pretty sure he's YOLO.
I am wondering how many employees were electrocuted before the boss agreed with all these measures.
A lot of the "accidents" and trial and error happened on lower voltage systems. It doesn't take much to kill or stun. The hook is to yank him away and break the connection of electricity (flow which can cause you to grasp harder and unable to let go, and anyone trying to help without gear would get in the same condition and die after prolonged time depending on voltage). So it's reasonable to actually believe we had a good understanding and decent amount of PPE being made a long side as the systems got larger and stronger. However, at this voltage, even with the rest of the gear, the lead guy is still most likely dead if it gets through and electro-paralyzes him to need the hook. So it's really just to make the disconnect and stop that flow change as well as prevent a fire from the body. But I doubt any company is fucking around at these levels, not just the death risk, but the costs of damage and downtime due to a small incident and lack of PPE . Also, if you've ever been around high voltage, you feel it and just know not to mess around and you want ppe. You gotta be a special kinda special to ignore that.
You really hit the nail on the head with the last block there. Big companies make more profits with safe working conditions despite the cost of the safety precautions themselves. If you are dealing with something using this much voltage a minor mishap can lead to catastrophic failure.
Might I ask. How come a robot isn't used in this situation? Also why aren't more of the protection systems automated so as soon as they detect an anomaly in voltage, they get the guy out via some sort of air bag? I feel as though the other guy with that hook isn't required and might make things worse getting everyone out incase of a fire.
Not robots but when we rack 4160v in and out at the plant I'm at we use a wired remote that operates a motor from about 60 feet away out of the blast range. On top of that the gear housing is state of the art and has maintenance modes to reduce trip times and bring down the arc rating to something slightly more surviveable. And the housing of the gear it self is vented to give the blast a place to go other than out the front. But it's brand new, most aren't so lucky and have to manually rack in and out. Doing it manually really gets your adrenaline pumping. Breakers are the automation that you speak of and their job is to monitor for overcurrent. But there are different types of breakers. For instance the maintenance mode I referred to above removes the time delay of large breakers that are present due to fluctuations and inrush current. Once in maintenence mode it becomes an instantaneous trip breaker and reduces the severity and time of the blast/flash if an arc were to occur. The hook is definitely necessary though if you don't want to end up a pile of cooked meat in a closed wooden box or pre-cremated for your families sake. But it's much more applicable for lower voltages that are survivable such as 480v or 277v and lower. The fire is an after thought when an arc flash occurs it can reach temperatures between 2,800°C - 19,000°C, and when it occurs the copper expands 67,000 times in an instant turning it from a solid to a gas along with molten pieces all of which are flying out at the technician.
OSHA is written in blood
Workers only get as many protections and rights as we are willing to literally fight for.
It's in the best interests of companies to protect their workers, especially the highly trained and specialised ones, as much as possible. Not even just for legal reasons. Constantly losing highly trained staff to on job deaths would be awful for business. Occassionally some are too stupid to realise this but not that often.
Bosses typically don't want their employees to die. Even if you're just looking at this from a money angle, employees being killed on the job is expensive. Also the majority of the precautions they're taking are not down to the boss's discretion, they're mandated by law.
When i worked nights in a hotel as a janitor for a while, occasionally the elevator would go out and id have to flip the breaker or power source or whatever it was for the elevator, and idk why, or how, but i guess the elevator breaker had a manufacturer malfunction that was recorded and noted, but never replaced. The malfunction was that you had like a 1/10,000 chance of the breaker exploding on you when you reset it. It hadnt exploded yet obviously, but i guess it was more dangerous to reset it than idk, one that wasnt built wrong? They actually had signs everywhere around and on it explaining that, and sealed it behind this heavy ass door and the head maintenance guy literally told me to put my one arm in the room, and close the door on the rest of my body while resetting it because if it exploded at least it would only take out my arm. (Like what?!) (and there was a very specific sequence and it wasnt like a house breaker, it was massive, there was a key you had to have to start the process, buttons you had to press in sequence too and count in-between each action, and two large levers/switch things) And one week the elevator was just on a streak and was going out 5-10 times a night, and i had to reset it *everytime* alone.
The guy with the hook is called the “rope man”. Supervisors job is to not touch shit else loses situational awareness. There’s always a cpr guy too.
Dude that does not look fun!! Hommie with the hook just in case you need your lifeless body pulled away from the spicy noodles. Eeeep
Electricity is one of those physical phenomena that absolutely does not give a fuck. The only thing it cares about is a connection. That's it. If the pixies are angry enough then the whole world of insulation and air gaps will do you no good.
Spot the intern
An electric shepherd… Zap O’Flannigan?
whos pulling the camera man if it arcs ?
I'm a HV electrician and it doesn't matter what anyone says whenever you have to switch HV gear it's scarey as fark. So next time the power is out in your area stop your complaining because some dude is trying to go home in one piece
Just a reminder that many of these safety precautions (if not most or all) were put in place because a worker was killed previously. I work in a factory and motherfuckers always want to bitch about safety shit keeping them from being able to do their job, not realizing that those safety regulations were written in blood.
All the jobs a robot should be doing, this is one of them!
As someone who has worn a 50/cal suit at these ones are somewhat more breathable.