Morbid question: high voltage running through a corpse

Factual Questions
1

To keep from hijacking the MPSIMS thread on the sad fate of a formerly missing Purdue freshman, I’m starting up a GQ thread on the subject.

There are a few informative links there, but I’ll summarize: a college student went missing back in January, and after two months of searching it turns out that he had tripped and been fatally shocked trying to get into a building to pick up his coat from a friend’s room.

During that time his remains had been a conduit for thousands of volts, while a combination of the cold, dry air and lack of insects preserved his body. The question is, what effect would constant high voltage have on a body under those circumstances? What condition would his remains have been in? That is, is “preserved” a relative term in this case?

2

(minor nitpick - it’s the current that is running through his body, not the voltage)

This is gonna get a bit morbid here, but hey, if you are this far into the thread I think you shouldn’t be surprised.

Electricity can kill you in a few different ways. A shock across your chest at just the right time can get your heartbeat to go out of whack. The way your heart is designed, once this happens it tends to stay out of whack, so unless someone is standing next to you with a portable defib unit, you’re in a big heap of trouble. It takes a surprisingly small amount of current to be able to do this. If you do get shocked it’s not likely to occur, but if it does occur it has a very high fatality rate.

A higher energy shock can cause all of the heart muscles to contract, and your heart stops beating. Just the same as above, you die basically because your heart isn’t pumping blood. Usually, if you can remove yourself from the source of current, the heart will start beating again.

The other thing that happens when higher amounts of current flow through you is that your body starts to literally get cooked by the electricity. One of the demonstrations you may have seen in some science class or some such is to stick a nail into either side of a hot dog, and connect a wire to each nail connected to a standard electrical plug. Plug it into ye ol nearby 120 volt electrical outlet, and you get a cooked hotdog in about a minute.

The human body is pretty similar to the hot dog. In higher current shocks (and especially in lightning) most of the damage comes from the body tissues being burnt. 120 volts will cook a hot dog in a minute or so. A few thousand volts will cook a hot dog (or you) in a much shorter time.

Once the skin becomes charred it’s resistance to the flow of electricity increases, so even though the voltage stays the same, the current flow decreases. After a very short time, I doubt that much current was flowing through the body.

A google image search for “electrical burn” has enough hits on the first couple of pages to give you an idea of what happens, as well as ruin your appetite for a couple of days.

3

Right. If you had known me IRL, you’d have an idea of how hard I just got smacked with the long arm of Gaudere’s Law because of that little bit of imprecision on my part. :smack:

The idea that this poor kid ended up like a hot dog is a chilling prospect. I’ve been curious as to why they needed to put up the tarps rather than just use a stretcher and body bag, but if I’m understanding you correctly, I suspect that it’s because his tissue was so charred they couldn’t reposition the body. There probably wasn’t much left that was recognizable, was there? What an awful way to die.