Pulp, SASS#28319 Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 We went through electrical safety training at the mill the other day, some statistics really impressed me: 1 in 300 industrial safety incidents results in a lost time 1 in 30,000 industrial safety incidents results in a fatality. 1 in 7 electrical safety incidents results in a fatality. I knew electricity was dangerous, but had no idea the statistics were that serious. So whether you're just plugging in your Christmas lights, or re-wiring 3500 volt motors, be careful out there. Lot's of folks have died from 110 volt systems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky Nelson Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 I knew electricity was dangerous, but had no idea the statistics were that serious. I'm not surprised. Mechanical injuries more often than not affect the extremities. You may damage or lose an arm or leg but you can still survive. Electricity on the other hand will mess you up from the inside out no matter where it contacts you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J-BAR #18287 Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 Wow! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sedalia Dave Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 Good rule of thumb is any voltage in excess of 30 volts can be lethal. There are a lot of variables that go into this number and it can be debated Ad infinitum but that is what we were taught in military electronics school and I have yet to see why following that rule is a bad idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krazy Kajun Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 I work for an electric utility and I can assure you that MANY more people are killed with 120 volts than with any other voltage by a wide margin. Be safe. Kajun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Original Lumpy Gritz Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 We went through electrical safety training at the mill the other day, some statistics really impressed me: 1 in 300 industrial safety incidents results in a lost time 1 in 30,000 industrial safety incidents results in a fatality. 1 in 7 electrical safety incidents results in a fatality. I knew electricity was dangerous, but had no idea the statistics were that serious. So whether you're just plugging in your Christmas lights, or re-wiring 3500 volt motors, be careful out there. Lot's of folks have died from 110 volt systems. It's not so much the volts that kill you. It's the amps. The human body is a great conductor-- OLG Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 and many electrical events are not recorded and don't become incidents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henry T Harrison Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 I welded several wrenches to duce and a half battery boxes in my military career, only 24 volts but it will get your attention. To this day I don't wear a wedding band. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twelve mile REB Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 I'm not knowledgeable enough to know but always heard that voltage burns amperage kills Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irish ike, SASS #43615 Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Automotive work grab a spark plug wire, 20,000v. but no real amps. Ike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cypress Sun Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 I welded several wrenches to duce and a half battery boxes in my military career, only 24 volts but it will get your attention. To this day I don't wear a wedding band. Been a professional electrician for almost 40 years.....I will not wear jewelry of any kind while working. Been zapped many times with 120v, burned severely by 240v (delta) and nailed by 277v. All made possible by one 1/2 second of inattention......although the 240v burn wasn't anything I could have prevented. Best advice I'll give is to turn the juice off if possible.....if not, don't ground yourself on whatever you're working on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Billy Bristol Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 It's the amps that get ya more than the volts.12 volts at 400 amps can kill ya quicker than 240 volts at 1 amp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cypress Sun Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Actually 10 milli amps (1/10th of an amp) can kill the normal human being......no matter the voltage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michigan Slim Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Caught some serious voltages in my time in the plants. Working on an arc flash program now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krazy Kajun Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Worst I ever got bit was when I was standing on a 5 gallon bucket to work on a 240/480 3 phase grounded delta meter base...the electrician mounted the meter base too high for me to reach it. It was an odd voltage that suppled a machine shop near the Intracoastal Canal. My company vehicle was a car so I did not have a ladder.Since it was a large customer and there was a question as to the accuracy of the meter the City Manager for the electric utility I worked decided he wanted his engineer to look at it. I had only been working in the utility business for about 6 months at the time and to say I was green would be giving me too much credit. I found the 5 gallon bucket on site and figured it would be ok to stand on since I was just going to use my volt meter to take some reading to make sure the high leg was in the correct position in the meter base. Well the back of my hand somehow touched the high leg and I was leaning against the meter base and I got hit with 416 volts. All I remember is picking myself off the ground after I had been knocked off the 5 gallon bucket. It was a truly monumental dumbass move on my part to have even attempted to work standing on a bucket and even more stupid to not have used the low voltage gloves that I had in my car....after all...I was only going to take a voltage reading using the meter...what could go wrong!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackwater 53393 Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 As a kid in high school, learning advanced electronics, I was taught the "rule of thumb". If you are working on electrical equipment, keep one thumb hooked in your back pocket!! If your body doesn't become part of the circuit your chances of injury are greatly reduced. Oh! On that spark plug wire thing...............Today's high voltage ignition systems have enough jolt to cause an arrhythmia! Some of them will hit you hard enough to make you hurt yourself even if they don't injure you directly!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky Nelson Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 .I was only going to take a voltage reading using the meter...what could go wrong!!! That's what a friend of mine thought. He was trying to measure a 20V DC supply lead on a big stepper relay that also had 120V AC on a different set of contacts. He slipped with the probe and bridged the two, and let the smoke out of about four racks worth of expensive gear. He was on a field service call and instead of doing a $300 repair his company ended up buying the customer a new $8,000 control system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duffield, SASS #23454 Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Worst I ever got bit was when I was standing on a 5 gallon bucket to work on a 240/480 3 phase grounded delta meter base...the electrician mounted the meter base too high for me to reach it. It was an odd voltage that suppled a machine shop near the Intracoastal Canal. My company vehicle was a car so I did not have a ladder. Since it was a large customer and there was a question as to the accuracy of the meter the City Manager for the electric utility I worked decided he wanted his engineer to look at it. I had only been working in the utility business for about 6 months at the time and to say I was green would be giving me too much credit. I found the 5 gallon bucket on site and figured it would be ok to stand on since I was just going to use my volt meter to take some reading to make sure the high leg was in the correct position in the meter base. Well the back of my hand somehow touched the high leg and I was leaning against the meter base and I got hit with 416 volts. All I remember is picking myself off the ground after I had been knocked off the 5 gallon bucket. It was a truly monumental dumbass move on my part to have even attempted to work standing on a bucket and even more stupid to not have used the low voltage gloves that I had in my car....after all...I was only going to take a voltage reading using the meter...what could go wrong!!! I have seen a Simpson 260 disappear in a flash and a puff of smoke when used in conjunction with one of those three phase transformers. Fortunately, I was only a bystander. Duffield Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Birdgun Quail, SASS #63663 Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 "Every Safety Rule and Warning has been written in blood." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sedalia Dave Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Remember shorting a 5 VDC bus bar to ground once with a meter lead. Tip of probe turned into plasma. Tool room guy couldn't understand why I couldn't bring back the missing tip of the probe to ensure there was no FOD. Personally I will not fool with line voltages above 120/208. Read too many mishap reports where 480 had learned to jump small distances. Inside avionics equipment I have worked with up to 50,000 VDC. But every time BEFORE you connect the probes you de-energize the equipment and discharge all the caps with a shorting bar. We do have a Marx generator that is no longer used. One of the few transmitters at work that I shy away from. It can generate voltages well in excess of 250,000 volts and it is very difficult to get all the capacitors fully discharged. The coorona discharge on the antenna is very impressive. It is also excellent at corrupting the magnetic strip on credit cards and wreaking havoc with electronics in the vicinity. You can read a little about them here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator Yes it is the current that kills but you need voltage to generate that current. Most people have a skin resistance of at least 500 ohms this means that for 1 milliamp of current you need a voltage in excess of 30 volts to create a potentially lethal shock. On average the body's resistance is well above 500 ohms. The voltage needed to generate a potentially lethal shock varies with the frequency if it is AC and above certain voltages the body experiences dielectric breakdown so the current actually increases as the duration of the application of voltage increases. This is why in my field RF burns are worse than those caused by 50/60 Hz line voltages or high voltage DC. Don't have a link to to my safety training manuals but this page gives a pretty good overview of how our bodies respond to electric shock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock#Body_resistance BTW When working with high voltages we all have one hand in our back pocket. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rusty Chains Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 "Every Safety Rule and Warning has been written in blood." Until a year ago, I would have said this was untrue simply by reading the "product safety warnings" on various small appliances available at your local big box store. One in particular that stood out when I was buying the wife a new iron (since I broke the old one - long story) well, I brought this home and was laughing about some of the warnings while talking to my daughter. I laughed pointing one of them out: "Do not iron clothes on body" and she said that is not funny. When I said who the hell would put a hot iron up against their skin with nothing but a bit of fabric in between, she said her boyfriend had burned himself that way. Needless to say that boy's major wasn't rocket science! Fortunately he is now an ex-boyfriend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky Nelson Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 When I said who the hell would put a hot iron up against their skin with nothing but a bit of fabric in between, she said her boyfriend had burned himself that way. Needless to say that boy's major wasn't rocket science! Fortunately he is now an ex-boyfriend. "Sorry son, no Darwin Award for you this year. But don't give up - next year may be your year!" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shorty Jack Hammer Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 Lock out Tag out I always say….. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Banjer Pickett Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 Ever picked up a fully charged magneto? You won't hold on to it fer too long! Used to love leaving one set on the counter at parts store. SOMEBODY wil pick it up out of curiosity every singlw time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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