What will happen if a person touches a power line on the telephone poles?
If you mean telephone poles then you’d be ok, but if you mean power poles, then you would still be ok if you were not touching anything else, or you were properly insulated.
OTOH, if you were standing on the ground and touched one with say one of those long carbon fishing poles, you stand a good chance of becoming similar material to the thing in your hand.
Are ther lines themselves insulted these days ???
What if the person was standing on the ground, and touched the power line?
Touched it with their hands, I should add.
Short answer? You’d fry.
wait… are powerlines covered with insulations or are they exposed wires.
Yes yes yes don;t touch the power lines, but what ? They are exposed ???
From this site.
Um…sorry stupid follow up question Ice… Umm… why don’t they have insulation ?
If i was to hazard a guess i would say cos of the extra weight that the line would have to endure may cause breakages… but then again could be $
Not such a “stupid follow up question”, trader_of_shots – I dunno.
Some wires are insulated, some aren’t. Could be to do with cost, use, resistance in the wires …
There is a loosely related Straight Dope column about why birds don’t get fried just sitting on the lines.
What may look like insulation on some lines is really just weather protective coating. Basic rule of thumb: don’t touch, mate, or you’ll end up as a crispy critter.
Oh yeah can dig … i am just curious now … picked up a bit of info that says %90 of overhead lines are not insulated, and being the conspiracy freak that i am, i am tryign to work out what the goverment is hiding.
Hmm bit more research indicates that the level of insulation (thickness) of polymers would be too great so it aint worth it.
Thoughts ?
Nother quick questions. We all know it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps. So does anyone know offhand how many amps do the power lines carry?
Another source. Don’t know if itr’s any help.
Reasons they are not insulated:
- Heat dissipation.
- Weight.
- Cost.
- Lack of need.
Strictly speaking it is neither the volts nor the amps that kill you.
It is the delivery of energy within a certain period of time, this is why you hear the actors on ER using the term “Joules” when using a heart defibrillator.
Joules is total energy, but when converted into a time dimension, this becomes Watts - Joules per second.
500KV and 1 amp is a huge amount of energy per second.
0.025amps can kill you given a supply voltage of 220V and bad luck.
Increase the voltage and you can use less current to kill, or conversely, decrease the voltage and it will take more current to kill.
Any voltage has to overcome the electrical resistance of the human body though, under 100V you would have to be incredibly unlucky to be killed directly by electricity.
Once the voltage gets above 1000V then you are getting into serious trouble, and at 500000V your chaces of survival are small, even if you don’t get killed by the shock, the arc burns through your body are horrific injuries, these are among the worst injuries apart from total localised flesh carbonisation that you can get.
My next door neighbour works on 500KV power lines, whilst they are live, there are ways of doing this safely but the precautions are pretty awesome.
The power line and the phone line that come into my house come off of the same pole. This is typical for Pennsylvania, even in residential areas, though I understand other areas have their power lines buried.
When you say “power pole”, do you mean the high-tension electric lines that are very high and always sizzle and snap? Or do you mean any residential electric line?
I see the tree limbs touching the lines occasionally, with no effects. Even when wet. When a limb severs an electric line there are sparks, though.
Casdave - Is right as usual, but I shall add more
Amps are (more directly) what kill. The amps are the wild card, whereas the voltage stays the same, the amps change according to the resistance. The higher the volts the easier the amps will travel through your resistive body.
What causes the damage to your body is the following,
-
the amount of amps
-
the path the current takes
-
the length of time of exposure
The volts aren`t as important as the amps because the amps can get you at lower voltages.
A static shock carries thousands of volts but nearly 0 amps.
If conditions were right you could be killed by a 50 volt source at mere milliamps.
You can touch any live wire, if you don`t complete the circuit to ground or to another hot wire of a different phase, without injury.
High voltage lines are not insulated. Cost and the fact that they are way up there are the reasons.
High voltage lines are not designed to carry lots of amps. The voltages get converted by the user via transformers. Volts and amps are inversely proportional. As the transformer kicks the volts down the ampere potential goes up. In other words, a large amp load at the user end does not reflect much on the high voltage lines.
I thought many Vandegraff Generators could pump out 500,000 volts and aren’t especially dangerous. Again I thought it was the near zero amperage that keeps users form getting fried.
Whack-a-Mole
Did we mention anything about VdeG devices or were we talking about power lines ? 
The static on your nylon shirt is likely in the order of 1000V or more, but not too may folk are killed directly by it, though the fashion police might have to kill their social lives.