The "I've been electrified! " II thread! (1 Viewer)

[KyleS]

The first thread of I have been electrified has got me thinking. What kind of electricity stories do we have out there, which you guys have experience first hand, or by seeing them? (Note that I may say some things are funny but I also understand how dangerous these situation were and how bad the outcome could have been, just relating back)
My worst experience had to be grabbing a hold wire to unplug a lamp in my grandfather’s shop. Unfortunately for me the wire had some nice bare spots and I got the full jolt. Talk about somebody running around and swearing
Funniest:
When I owned a computer shop we never repaired the monitors that flaked out because we could either get them replaced or it just wasn’t worth it. A buddy of mine came into our shop and noticed there was a dead 19" monitor sitting in a closet and asked what was wrong with it. We told him that it just stopped working but he was more then welcome to it. Right when he starting taking the back off we warned him multiple time about the charge that they can hold. Well he was messing around inside and not to long after I see a spark and him yanking his arm away. It looked just like Tim Allen in Home Improvement when he was messing with the dishwasher). You know it was bad when he didn’t want to say anything for a few minutes with his arm down at his side. Not a good experience for him but a great laugh after the initial are you OK talk for the rest of us.
2nd funniest:
My brother and I were out hunting and he needed to go to the bathroom really bad so he went over next to a tree and let it fly. Unfortunately for him on the other side of the bushes and tree was an electric fence. I don’t think I have ever heard someone yell so loud in my life. Definitely an experience I hope I never have the joy of getting.
Worst I have seen:
I helped my father put up a 9 foot electric fence to help keep the Deer out of his yard. Well this fence had 10K Volts going to it to bring the pain down but no Amps. When we hooked it up you could literally here the snapping coming from the power box and it just made you shudder and my uncle and I laughed that someday my dad would get it. Well about 2 weeks later my dad was out raking leaves out in the yard and he backed into it. It got him pretty good and all he did was fall forward. He laid there for a good 15 minutes before getting up and letting me know never to do what he had just done because it hurt like Mother Fuc*&
KyleS

 

[John Spencer]

When I was 13 my friends and I were about 10 yards from a baby tree when it got hit by lightning. It knocked us all down and into the ground. I'm pretty sure I had mud all the way into the back of my sinus cavities. The weird thing was that it also dried out our clothes for the most part. And that was just the concussive force of the bolt. I can only imagine what it must be like to be hit by one. *shudder*

 

[Jagan Seshadri]

I was three years old, and I liked to play with the toy where you match up the plastic shapes with similarly-shaped holes.

Lo and behold, a hairpin!! Hmm, where does *that* shape go? Ah, I bet it goes in those two slots in the wall...let's see 'PZZZZZZZZZZZZZEWWWWW'.

Luckily I had grounded one end of the pin before the other end hit the hot lead. I wnded up with a zigzag burn on my index finger. My "discovery" tripped the breaker and my mom came looking for me. She says that I was just silent and wide-eyed, looking at my finger.

Ah, memories.

And now I'm an electrical engineer. Go figure.

-JNS

 

[Dave Poehlman]

Funny:
My family was visiting friends out in the country. I carried my 2-year old niece across the street to look at the horses over the fence. Well, just as I noticed the wire running around the perimeter of the fence I felt a jolt down the base of my neck. I jumped back with my niece and she looked at me, startled, and said "Ow" after she had grabbed the wire.
Scary & Funny:
My parents house is old. It was once a duplex converted into a single family. So, the fusebox was a mish mosh of sockets and breakers... basically a fire waiting to happen. Well, my parents were out of the country and my brothers and I were hanging out. The dryer blew a fuse.. in fact, it blew a chunk out of the fuse socket! And, upon closer inspection, it looked like a big piece of copper was shorting out some wires (I don't know anything about fuse boxes so, I don't know what this piece was or where it belonged). So, my brother thought we need to move that piece out of there before it starts a fire or something. Well, he slips a plastic handled screwdriver to try and nudge this metal strip. Well, his arm slips and hits the fuse box door and he receives a jolt through his forearm. We then decided we should call a professional. I went upstairs to my other brother's room and stuck my head in the door where he was laying in bed watching TV this whole time and I asked, "did the lights go dim up here?"
"Yeah, what was that?"
"That was Bob getting electrocuted."
Then I left the room to leave him wonder.

The weird thing was that it also dried out our clothes for the most part.

John, I've heard stories of people getting struck by lightning in the rain and the jolt turns the rain water instantly to vapor actually blasting the clothes off of the person struck. I have yet to verify this effect, though.

 

[Greg Rowe]

When working with a powersupply for a computer I wired the power switch wrong. When I turned on power the switch blew up. I started a VERY small fire on the workbench. The leads on the switch had melted off, and had left burn marks on the table. Luckily I turned on power via a pwoer strip and not by flipping the switch.

My brother once asked me to put my finger in the spark plug hole of his dirt bike. He then kicked it over. Ow.

People in high school thought I was crazy because I kept playing with a vandegraph generator intentionally sparking myself.

 

[Bill Catherall]

Lightning
I was about 14 years old, my sister was 12. We were having a pretty bad electrical storm and we both ran upstairs to shut a window so the rain wouldn't come in. My sister reached over the desk putting one hand on an old lamp cord and the other on the aluminum window. I was standing right behind her. As she started closing it a huge lightning bolt cracked right over our house (no delay between light and thunder...with immediate power surge in the house). My sister's pony tails jumped straight up and I bounded 15 feet across the room in one jump and down the full flight of stairs in 2. We were both pretty frightened.
AC/DC?
I was about 11 years old and thought I would have some fun with a nice thick piece of copper wire. For some reason I thought house electricity was DC and that I could get a night light to turn off by shorting the two prongs with my wire. I pulled the light out of the socket just far enough expose the prongs but still had the light lit. I touched one end of the wire to one prong...then just as I touched the other end to the other prong a flash of sparks jumped out and burned a nice black mark on the outlet and up the wall. Luckily the wire was insulated so I wasn't hurt...but about a half inch of insulation was melted at each end and one of the prongs was almost melted off.
Don't do this at home kids!
Lazy handyman
This was last year. I was rewiring a switched socket in my bedroom so that only half would be switched and the other half would be always on. I was too lazy to go out and turn off the breaker and figured I could safely work on it. I was using insulated tools so as long as I didn't touch anything I should be fine.
Well as I was holding one the wires with my needlenose pliers and trying to twist them together with another set of pliers I started feeling a slight tingly buzzing sensation in one hand. Just then I accidentally touched the needlenose pliers to the grounded case of the outlet and sent sparks flying (didn't I learn my lesson already?). Fortunately it tripped the breaker so I could continue working with no more hazzard.

 

[PhilipW]

Working at an amusement park with wet slides one summer. At the beginning of the season we'd have to sump pump all the dirty water that built up over the winter. We had 4 sump pumps going in the big pool at the bottom and someone accidently kick the power box into the water. Everyone jumped out but me. I actually reached in and grabbed the box. Quite a hair raising experience. I couldn't drop it until someone else unplugged it from the wall.

Christmas lights.

Sitting on top of a 6' chain link fence I attempted to take out a broken bulb with a screwdriver. Forgot to shut the lights off first. Knocked me right off the fence.

 

[Cam S]

The scariest and funniest experience I had ever witnessed happened several years ago in grade 9. A few buddies and myself had been helping out our woodworking teacher build a full size Cessna Cockpit for a flight simulator complete with a huge projection screen. The projector that we had used was a really old one with the 3 color cannons. One of my friends (a really big polish kid) was up on the scaffolding (which was about 18 feet high) that was under the projector, where he was working on it. We weren't paying much attention to him but we all of a sudden heard him making funny noises and all the lights in the woodwork shop dimmed way down. Next thing we know he's flying backwards, off of the 18 foot scaffolding and lands right on the roof of the teachers car. We were all standing there in shock as to what had just happened, and in even more shock when he climbed off the crumpled roof and just laughed about what he had just done to himself. The kid wasn't even fazed by it. Man did that roof take a beating though, he weighed a good 190lbs and totally caved in the roof of the 80's Oldsmobile. I'll NEVER forget that time
The funniest experience I have had with electricity was about a month ago. Our neighbors have a large empty orchard in behind our house and and it has some nice hill's and creeks etc etc, so one day I walked behind my house to take some nice pictures of the scenery. The only thing keeping the horses in their field was a simple rope running along the border of the field, and I couldn't figure out how this managed to keep them in. Well I soon found out. As I was heading back to my house I just went through the horse pasture, and as I grabbed the rope to go under it the my entire right arm froze up and it felt like it it was on fire, so I let go of the thing and just fell to the ground. I couldn't figure out what the hell just happened, until I looked at the rope and noticed a few metal wires running in the weaves of the rope, HAHAHA, DOH! Now I know why the horses don't don't near the ELECTRIFIED rope. It probably didn't help that it had been raining all day so I was wet and so was everything else

 

[Ryan Wright]

1. Working in one of the plants at my last employer, we were running a cat5 network cable down into the palletizer (takes product and stacks it on a pallet, then sends it on it's way on a huge conveyor belt). So, the main case of this thing (bigger than a large fridge) is open and there are banks of fuses about 4" long and 1" thick all over in there. It's operating, of course, while we do this, but since we are on the other side of the machinery we were safe from being mangled. But not from electricity.

So, here I am, snuggled up within a few inches of this open, live panel, fishing a wire through some conduit with a coworker. We've all got hearing protection in, bump caps on our heads, and you have to lean over and literally yell in each other's ears to communicate due to the earplugs and the noise levels in the plant. So anyway, my boss leans over, taps me on the shoulder, points at the banks of fuses and casually says, "That's 440." I say, "Volts?", and he nods. Oh, shit. I quickly took two steps back and finished working with my arms extended, from a distance. Came close to killing myself there.

2. Pulled into the parking lot at work after lunch one day and my car began stumbling. I left the engine running and popped the trunk open (I drive cars with the engine behind the passengers, where it belongs) to take a look. Lo and behold, the main wire on my distributor was fried right through and was arcing a good inch. This little lightning storm in the center of my engine caused me much concern, not to mention the nasty burning smell from the rubber wire, so what did I do? Reached out and grabbed it. I wanted to pull the wire away so it would stop arcing - and I've worked on cars enough to know better. It held my arm in place for awhile and I had to grab my elbow with my other hand and pull the first hand away. Couldn't release my grip or anything. Thankfully, I was able to get the wire far enough away to stop the spark and kill the engine, but it shocked the hell out of me in the meantime. My arm hurt for hours afterwards.

 

[Ryan Wright]

Oh, I forgot to add, a friend of mine in high school got thrown across the room by household current. His 100 some odd gallon saltwater aquarium began leaking - a seal failed on his pump and it was pumping water onto the floor. His bass guitar was plugged into it's amp, and the amp plugged into the wall, both sitting in a small pool of saltwater. He instinctively reached for the guitar to remove it from the danger of being destroyed by the water. The second he touched the strings he was thrown across the room. Somehow the electricity was channeled through the amp and into the guitar...

He came to, dragged himself down the hall to a phone and dialed 911. His sister almost sent the paramedics away (they had a huge house, his parents were gone and his sister had no idea her brother was dying in the back room) until one of them said, "Someone said they got electrocuted with a bass guitar." She then ran screaming down the hall towards his room with the paramedics in tow.

He had nasty holes in his hands and elsewhere on his body and looked like hell. Got burnt pretty bad, broke his nose to the extent that it required plastic surgery, etc. Lived, thankfully, but man, what an experience.

 

[Neil Joseph]

I did electrical engineering. It's funny when you study something like that then people assume you can fix everything of theirs from the cantina toaster to water cooled supercomputer and everything in between.
I was working on some large equipment one time and I stuck my hand inside the machine (couldn't see where I was sticking my hand) and I accidently touched 120V. I was lucky not to be too well grounded but I flung a screwdriver across the room.
On a more serious/scary note, I was working on something at work (back when I was green). A specialist dropped by on his 25th anniversary so he decided to help me out. When he was working on wiring 3-phase into the backside of the machine, I proceded to plug in the power on the front side of the machine. Needless to say, I almost retired him on his 25th anniversary. Scary, especially considering it was 3-phase 220V high current.

 

[Steve Peterson]

At my last employer, we had a back room repairing terminals. One of the guys doing the repairs told me his story about eletricity. When he was in school for TV repair, a classmate was wearing a thin gold chain around her neck on a day that they were learning how to discharge the caps in TVs. Well, she leaned forward and the gold chain touched the flyback and instaneously vaporized. She was left with a nice branding mark of where the chain was on her neck.

A friend from church was working on the 220 to the dryer. He shut off the breaker, but he discover the hard way that they had mislabeled the breaker box. He had shut off the oven. While working on the box, a screwdriver shorted the line and blew him across the garage. He said it took 2 days for the ringing in his ears to go away.

While I was in high school, I spent a summer on my aunt and uncle's farm. One day a fierce thunderstorm rolled in with hail, lighting, wind, etc, etc. My cousins and I were upstairs moving bedrooms around when the storm came in. One of my cousins suggested that I go down and let all the kittens that were outside onto the porch. When I got downstairs and was holding open the screen door, I lighting bolt hit a silo 30 to 40 yards away. Everything was suddenly filled with static electricity and the screen door discharged onto my arm that it was leaning on. Scared the crap out of my. Needless to say that the cats did not get inside that momment.

Steve "Blew out a bulb in one of the bedrooms too." Peterson

 

[KyleS]

Man like I said this is a serious subject when these things happen but when you think back on them they can be funny. Some of your guys experiences were pretty damn scary & funny. Keep them coming.

KyleS

 

[Lance Nichols]

My current house was built by a bunch of drunken monkeys. (BTW don't get me started on the quality of the trades these days). I was busy replacing all the switches in the house from the toggle style rocker to the decora type rockers when I discovered that not only did they do a piss poor wiring job (each floor in one one 15 amp breaker essentially)but some of the breakers were mis-labled. The arc vaporized a nice chunk of my screwdriver to bits, and later I discovered the missing end of the screwdriver buried in the wall behind me. Must have missed my head by about 2 inches.

Then there was the time I was trying to trouble shoot the ignition on my '49 Fargo 1/2 ton. My brother kept cranking it over while I couldn't let go of the distributor. Wow, did that ever light me up. My brother learned a whole bunch of new, Technicolor words after that!

Edit, months after posting, I spellcheck, good god!

 

[Ken Garrison]

I've got zapped many time in my life. Let's see.

Playing with the plugs and accidently touching the prongs.

Touching an electric fence.

Accidently sitting on an electric fence.

Getting zapped by the spark plug wire on the lawnmower.

Getting zapped from the 250 volt capacitor on the computer modem.

Getting zapped from the 250 volt capacitor on another computer modem.

That's about it. I got zapped a lot more than that.