Did this guy survive Electrocution?

OUCH!

This makes me glad the other techs told me to stand away from open electrical panels at least without wearing a solid cotton shirt...

Tim

-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website:

Probably, although he probably wishes he hadn't. I'm happy that I never have to do hi power hi voltage engineering.

"amdx" wrote in news:8e40b$4891ef81$4501396f$11395 @KNOLOGY.NET:

Where's the evidence that he was actually electrocuted? All I can see is a big flash and smoke; this suggests a big short circuit burning stuff up. The panel hides most of the details. It appears he is working on something, such as turning a wrench or working some mechanism like a hydraulic pump but that's purely my conjecture.

I'm guessing he had a lot of flash/flame burns at the least. People have survived worse. Electrical burns can run deep and are really hard to recover from.

--Damon

He's "racking" a circuit breaker (CB) - connecting it to a live HV bus using a screw like mechanism. The CB was likely initially pulled for periodic maintenance work. Although racking is done with the circuit breaker open, there are a number of potential (abnormal) situations that can make this activity very high risk.

The good news is that the electrician appears to be wearing protective gear. He's also standing off to the side, and the blast may have actually blown him clear of the main stream of vaporized copper. If he was full wearing protective clothing, face mask (or at least protective goggles), and hearing protection, then the odds are good that he survived this horrific incident. BTW, this particular arc flash event was relatively LONG - about 5 seconds, and it may have been a higher voltage feeder (greater than 480 volts). The arc quickly eats through the top plate (likely ~1/4" steel) at the rear of the cabinet. These events can easily evaporate the involved bus bars, like an uncontrollable multi-megawatt welder from Hell...

Bert

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