Sorry for the excessive amount of posts in GQ, but this one I came across very recently, and had me intrigued.
So, I was browsing around the internet a little earlier and came across an article which claimed that a electric pole worker had been decapitated by an electric shock. I had a look, but the article didn’t really have much information, but had a few photos of some guy holding some other guy’s head in a cap by the hair, and also the head resting on the metal pylons and a shot of the head and the body reattached in some sort of morgue/medical bay, for some reason.
But I’ve never heard of someone being beheaded by a electric pole before. Is this just extremely rare, or was the man manually beheaded earlier, and someone just placed his head on the electric pylons, maybe as some ISIS propaganda or something, like, saying that the supernatural forces are awakening or something?
I also googled it, and found nothing except regular electrocutions without any decapitation. I’m genuinely curious here, is this something that happens often, or is it extremely rare? What would be the minimum amount of electricity required to do this?
Just guessing, but high enough to current flow could either cause enough heating to cause body fluids to instantly create a steam explosion and blow off body parts, or burn them right off.
Does this really happen with electric pylons, though? I mean birds fly into them all the time without exploding, usually they just die or stick onto them.
Lots and lots of people are electrocuted/shocked by train lines and other high-current pylons all the time (across the world) as well, and you don’t normally see heads and arms popping off and flying across the street.
There are power lines and there are power lines. They aren’t all created equal. The two main types are transmission lines and distribution lines. Transmission lines carry power over long distances, typically from a generating facility to areas where the power will be used. Transmission lines run at very high voltages, tens of thousands of volts up to hundreds of thousands of volts. Distribution lines are lower in voltage, typically somewhere between 3,000 and 12,000 volts, though some can get up around 20,000 volts.
Since you mention “pylons”, I assume you are talking about transmission line towers. Those lines are very high in voltage and carry an awful lot of power. If you accidentally touch the wrong thing up there, there’s enough energy present to flash bits of your body into steam and explode off a limb, or decapitate a head. It’s not common, but it can happen. There is a tremendous amount of energy there.
Birds can land on transmission lines because they aren’t big enough to contact multiple lines or to create a short between the lines and the (grounded) tower. A human is big enough. If a bird lands on the right spot on a transformer, it can get toasted. It happens from time to time.
Squirrels tend to be more of a problem than birds. They often climb onto distribution transformers and get pretty much vaporized, often taking out power to several neighborhoods in the process.
I think this merits a little more explanation. Electricity can only harm you if it flows from a point of high potential, through your body, to a point of lower potential. A bird (or a human) can’t be harmed by touching a single wire, no matter how high a voltage is flowing through it. The electricity has to have a way to leave your body and reach a point of lower potential, such as another wire, or the ground, or something conductive that’s touching the ground.
Had this happen a few years ago, was sleeping in that day and heard a gigantic “boom” and the power went out, called the Fire Dept. to be safe. They pointed out the bit of leftover squirrel in the alley. If I remember correctly it had something to do with the transformer being shorted and the squirrel doing it. Not sure about why it happened, but the piece of squirrel on the ground was a giveaway as to the cause.
You can do the math on the energy available. In simple terms, there is enough energy running through a major transmission line to power a city. The only reason a human won’t be totally vaporised is that the bits get blown away from the power source before they are fried.
Very high voltage power lines are an interesting problem. You don’t need to have current run through you to do damage. With a high enough voltage the electrical field is intense enough that it can disrupt biological processes just by being too close. This is why you see workers on live systems wear a conductive suit hitched to the line. Basically they are inside a flexible Faraday cage, and although their entire body is elevated to the potential of the conductor they are working on, inside the suit the potential gradient is close enough to zero not to cause harm.
I don’t know any details of this, but I was talking to a friend last week who’d just got out of hospital, and he mentioned that another guy on the ward was in there after a severe electric shock which had “blown all his toes off”.
I wonder if the loss of body parts isn’t more likely to be from what happens after the shock. Someone up a pylon will fall a long way, probably through metal spars, before hitting the ground.
Electric current travels through the inside of your body, not just along the surface. Hence, it can cause severe internal burns that aren’t visible or obvious. It’s possible the victim might not even be aware – apparently, different parts of the inside of a body have differing endowments of pain receptors, and it’s possible to suffer a severe internal burn with little or no pain.
But it’s not uncommon, though, after a sever shock, to end up in a hospital and have some internally roasted limbs amputated.
I wouldn’t doubt it for a second. I saw a video of a guy in Africa who had been messing around in some sort of large power box (I’ll call it).
He zigged when he should have zagged and got fried something fierce. His hands were fused to the interior of the box and a his torso had a split like a dropped watermelon. I can’t see how that kind of energy directed elsewhere on the body couldn’t blow a limb off.
Must touch is for low voltage or domestic supply…
For transmission line voltages, the conductors (metal, animals, plants,ground,etc) must be seperated by a minimum distance of air.
The higher the voltage, the larger the gap required. So that is why the transmission lines have larger and larger insulators …for higher voltages.
If one conductor is moved in between, and the air gap is reduced below minimum, then the current flows… Now the air in this spark gap rapidly gets hot, and turns to plasma ( atoms with no electrons… electrons free in the same space… ) which is conductive. So more current flows… The animals body can be burnt away in no time, being turned to steam, CO2,soot,ash, or plasma… Plasma means that there is no molecules… there’s no structure, the substance is reduced to individual atoms.