Yes, you could have possibly kicked the bucket.
As for why you didn’t die, electricity tends to kill you in one of two ways.
The first way is that it literally cooks you to death. As the current flows through you, it generates heat (since you aren’t a superconductor), and that heat literally cooks your tissues and causes damage. This is generally how lightning bolts and electric chairs and high voltage shocks kill people. It takes a pretty large amount of current to kill you, so it’s not surprising that you didn’t die from this.
The second way is that electricity can screw up your heartbeat and cause it to go into fibrillation. This is a state in which your heart isn’t pumping correctly, and instead of a nice normal rhythm your heart just kinda sits there and shakes. Your heart has kind of a funny design in that this fibrillation state is stable. In other words, if you can get your heart into fibrillation it will generally stay there unless something else forces it back out of this state. Since your heart is shaking and not pumping blood effectively, you pass out and eventually die. Hopefully there’s a portable defibrillator nearby and someone can shock your heart back into a normal rhythm.
This second type of death is much more hit or miss. Not only does it depend on the exact path that the current takes through your chest, but how likely you are to go into fibrillation also depends on exactly where your heart is in its cycle at the time of the shock. At certain points in your heart’s cycle it is significantly more susceptible to being thrown out of rhythm than others. The amount of current required to throw your heart into fibrillation is surprisingly small. If you can feel the shock, then you had more than enough current present to do the job. The amount of current matters too. Currents below 5 mA are thought to be safe. Around 100 mA the heart is much more likely to go into fibrillation.
Oddly, once you get to much higher current levels (a couple of amps) the heart is actually much less likely to be thrown out of rhythm. What happens instead is that the entire heart just clamps. It’s still not beating, but once you remove the current and stop the heart muscles from all contracting at once, the heart usually goes back into a normal rhythm. Once you get above this level of current though you start getting to the point where burn damage kills you.
Your shock was very much in the hit or miss range of current, so it’s not all that surprising that you lived. But then again you could have easily been killed. So as your safety officer said, congratulations on not dying.
Not necessarily. It’s much more likely that the neutral wire broke.
How old is this equipment? It sounds to me like the neutral broke and the equipment in question grounded the case through the neutral. When the equipment is “on” this causes the case to become “hot” and creates a shock hazard. Because the neutral is busted, you would have an electrically hot case but no current flowing through the unit, so the lights would not be on.
Your typical breaker won’t usually blow in this type of situation. There isn’t any fault current flowing, so there’s nothing to trip the breaker. This is why they invented GFCIs.
