What is the most violent/scary/funny electrical event you've ever seen/been in?

[WyverntekGameRepairs]

I couldn't find anywhere else relevant to post this, so I'll post it here.

I've heard quite a few funny and scary stories from Clive (from BigCliveDotCom), and I thought it would be cool if there was a thread where everyone could trade their stories of their experiences with electricity - Particularily the hilarious, scary, and nasty ones. Preferably involving bright flashes, arcs, bangs, and loud noises, followed by sparks and skid marks.

The goal of this thread post is really to bring people together to share experiences with electricity and trade our stories of hilarious accidents or scary "I'm-damn-lucky-I-survived-that!" incidents. Because let's face it - We are all humans. We make mistakes.

As a starter, I'll share my own story of survival.
About a year ago now, I got electrocuted. Not by your normal 120VAC mains, no. I mean by a microwave oven transformer. About 1.5KV-2KV of raw electricity. How did it happen? Well, let me set the scene for you.
I was out in my makeshift workspace I had made out of a desk in our shed. It was about 70°F, so not particularly hot - but still hot enough for my palms to get sweaty were I to become nervous. I was using my microwave transformer to arc melt some copper wire I had into small copper beads. I was a little nervous, so I did have a bit of moisture on my hands. I wasn't too afraid of the arcs anymore, especially since I had placed a couple of microwave capacitors in series with the load and thus made them a wee bit smaller than the scary Jacob's Ladder grade arcs I was used to from it. I had finished one load of copper beads, and decided to see if the transformer was beginning to overheat by giving it a feel as I usually do. However, that is where I screwed up, really badly. I had forgotten to unplug the transformer, and forgot that the body of the transformer is shorted to the secondary winding - the high voltage winding - of the transformer. I was holding the pliers with the wire connected to the capacitors, which were connected to the transformer. Next thing I knew, I was stuck to the transformer and buzzing at 60Hz with an intensity that made me feel like my very soul was being ripped from my body. I couldn't let go. I tried and tried, but I was grabbing on too tightly to  the transformer. A spasm made me yank the heavy transformer up to my chest, where it arced through my shirt and through my chest for a few milliseconds before I had another spasm that caused me to throw the transformer and pliers down. I found myself lying on my chair, I don't exactly remember how I had fallen or staggered or when, I can't exactly remember too well (perhaps memory loss from the electrocution?). I could smell the stench of burning flesh, it was awful. I looked down and dumbfoundedly examined my chest and hands. I had skid marks on my hands, and 2 or 3 deep holes burnt into each of them. A few on my middle finger on my right hand, and a few on my pinkie and index finger on the left. My chest had 3 deep holes burnt into it, one was nearly an inch in diameter. I suddenly realised I had just beed shocked, and my heart might have stopped. I stumbled and rushed my way into my sleeping grandmother's room and woke her up to have her take me to the emergency room, and she was none too pleased. The doctor at the ER told me that I would be fine, and I was lucky to not have gone into afib or had my heart stopped. I still have the scars to this day. The lesson I learnt from that was to never, ever get too comfortable around high voltage, and always double check that you turn off anything you are servicing before you go poking about in / with it.

I can't wait to hear some of your stories!

[David Hess]

I picked up my 25 kilovolt neon sign transformer by the insulators when it was plugged in once.  After that, I added a neon bulb to the AC input.

Another time I was installing a home made 1000 volt DC stroboscope supply and I managed to bridge the output between the tip of my index finger and elbow.  The shock knocked me off of the ladder so that I landed on the concrete across the room.  My arm hurt for a week.  The lesson learned was not to use any more capacitance than necessary on a high voltage DC supply.

The various 120 and 240 volt AC power line shocks and shorts I have been part of pale in comparison to those two events.

Once when I was working on an audio power amplifier on my workbench, there was a loud hum, the light dimmed, and then a few seconds later, one of the output stages erupted in flame and sparks.  It reminded me of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea where whenever something went wrong, an instrument panel erupted in sparks and flame.

[james_s]

I went to disconnect the anode wire from a 19" CRT monitor I was working on using my finger. Not only did I forget to discharge the tube first, I forgot to turn off the monitor. Ouch.

Don't work with high voltage when you are tired or distracted.

[Psi]

At a job i had ages ago we didn't have enough rolls of solder for everyone, so you would go find the roll and pull off a meter to take back to your desk.

I went and got some solder but i left it as one long unwound length instead of coiling it up. This was a mistake.
I threw the length of solder onto my work area and sat back down.

I then began to solder some wires to a PCB.
I put the iron tip on the PCB and started feeding in some solder.
Then BANG.  Flash, Smoke and a charred hole in the PCB!!
WTF.

The solder wire had been laying on top of a 4-way mains powerboard on my desk. When i pulled it the other end moved into a little gap underneath a plug in that powerboard. Then i pulled it some more and it touched the PHASE pin,

The iron tip was grounded of course, so it made a direct mains short through 1 meter of solder. 
I didn't feel any shock. Probably because i was touching it right near the earthed end.
The arc blew away the solder at both ends, breaking the connection.

[nali]

When I was a teenager my Dad decided to re-wire the house, being the UK that means a ring circuit where the cables are looped between outlets. I had to help him feed some cable between adjacent rooms via some holes cut in the floorboards, so I'm lying on the floor in the corner of one room, arm under the floor up to my shoulder groping for the cable he's feeding from a reel in an adjacent room.

I got a few shocks, the last one quite literally made me see stars. Dad insisted the cable wasn't live (it was being fed from a reel) while I'm being well.. an angry teenager.

Turns out, as he was wiring the (live!) ring room by room, the outlet I was laid next to had a live wire poking out, which he'd unwrapped ready for connecting to the next segment  My arm was under the floor wedged against copper heating pipes and this wire end was poking the back of my head just behind my ear! 

It never affected me one bit though, I turned out perfectly normal 

[daqq]

What is the most violent/scary/funny electrical event you've ever seen/been in?

From afar I've watched a Black Friday sale in an electronics store.

[tautech]

Similar threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/things-that-terrify-you-on-the-bench/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tell-us-about-a-time-you-got-electrocuted/

I'm quite sure there are more.

[larrybl]

I think I posted this in one of the other links listed, but it fits nicely here. In my teens I worked on tube / valve TV's and radios. I had a 21" Color TV that I had replaced the picture tube, the 2nd anode did not have the rubber boot installed, and I was adjusting the yoke alignment using a mirror to see the front. The picture was tilted, so I usually just pull the vertical out-put tube to get a horizontal line so I could level the picture. Well when the tube came out of the socket my hand went straight up into the 2nd anode. From the chair I was sitting in, I opened my eyes to be staring at the celling lamp in the middle of the room. I had a 1.5" slice to the bone on my finger completely cauterized. This happened in my teens, and now at 62 I still have the scar, both physically and mentally. 

[25 CPS]

I think I posted this in one of the other links listed, but it fits nicely here. In my teens I worked on tube / valve TV's and radios.

I started out the same way when I was a teenager but it was more recent after vacuum tubes left common use but I had gotten interested in them because of how they were a relative of incandescent lightbulbs and ushered in the electronics era, but weren't something seen very often outside of guitar amplifiers.  Anyways, that's the background for the story that comes next.

I was working on an AM/FM tuner from the golden age of hifi and had a stiff IF transformer slug that would turn but not easily and it was rounding out the tip of my alignment tool.  Enter the jeweller's screwdriver.  I knew that this wasn't ideal and would cause some amount of mistuning in the transformer but I figured I could get it close using the screwdriver and then the final adjustments on it with the alignment tool to keep the wear down on it.  I had the tuner standing on its side so I could get at the tops and the bottoms of the IF transformers with one hand holding it so it wouldn't fall over and the other holding the screwdriver making adjustments.  The problem was, the access hole on the bottom of the transformer was crowded by component leads and eventually, I angled the screwdriver while I was removing it and bumped into one of the leads and got a nasty shock and could not let go of either the chassis or the screwdriver which was rattling around and making/breaking contact with the flying component leads surrounding that hole.  I was actually thinking about rolling out of my chair and falling on the floor to get off of it but my arms were flapping around a bit with the shocks and the screwdriver disengaged long enough for me to pull my arm away and break the circuit.  That gave me a scare.  I traced the circuit around the transformer on the diagram and it was fed from the 320 V B+.  I finished the work off with a pair of leather gloves and any metal tools wrapped up in electrical tape.  This early experience informed a lot of my working practices around live high voltage equipment.  It was a serious scare.
.
The other one was a total freak accident that I couldn't have prevented.  A severe thunderstorm blew through the neighbourhood out of nowhere and did all sorts of damage when I was 18 and I got hit by lightning.  Not sure if it was direct hit or if the lightning hit nearby and I got a walloping from being too close but I had no idea what happened and don't have any recollection of it actually taking place, and it was only a bit after that my mother and I figured out what had happened since I was on my own at the time.  I came to slumped over and hurting everywhere and felt my heart beat start up with a thump and I had no idea what just happened.  Compared to the shock from the tube tuner, the lightning was done and over in an instant, not a protracted, drawn out shock but also unlike the tuner, the lightning strike left some serious injuries some of which are still giving me trouble even now.

[GregDunn]

I don't work with high voltage (at least higher than mains) so the scariest electrical events I've ever witnessed have been lightning strikes.  The closest one was when driving along a street during an incoming storm and the lightning struck a utility pole right in front of me.  When lightning hits it produces a strange lemon yellow glow around the target and I remember looking at the pole's crossbar and seeing that glow as all 4 of the power lines were severed and the loose ends fell to the ground.  Pretty impressive from 20-30 feet away; it sounded like a shotgun going off in my ear.

That same yellow glow happened when I was sitting in my car waiting for rain to subside so I could cross the parking lot to enter my workplace one morning.  The lightning split into a circular fan and spread across the flat metal roof of the building, like an inverted tree.  I'm glad I wasn't any closer, because even at a distance through the rain it was louder than the up-close strike.  When I got inside, the people working in there hadn't even noticed the event.

Another one I didn't witness up close was a strike which took out a tree in our neighbor's yard.  We actually saw it from a distance of several miles and it was quite big.  Got back into the neighborhood and saw a yard full of splinters, many jammed upright into the ground.  Tree was almost vaporized.

When I see stories about people surviving lightning strikes I can only think that they were lucky to not get a direct hit.

[Nusa]

Cross-country night flight in a Cessna 182 (that's a 4-seat single-engine plane). I was dozing in the right seat, my Dad was flying. Suddenly there was a really bright light and Dad was yelling my name. Turns out there'd been a lightning strike, and he was flash-blind. I could still see so I took over flying. Dad's vision started coming back after about 3 minutes, but it took about 30 minutes to achieve decent night vision. Good thing too, since I wasn't rated to land that aircraft, although I knew enough to do it (I was 15 at the time, but I soloed in gliders a year earlier). We couldn't find any damage to the aircraft afterward.

[BreakingOhmsLaw]

I worked as a maintenance engineer in a big factory back in the 90s.
Every sunday night, we has a "start-up shift" were a skeleton team of 4-5 electrical engineers came in to start all the huge ovens so they would be heated up once production started a monday morning.
Turning on the ovens came with a challenge: While heating up, the regulators would work at 100% duty cycle until temperature had been reached and they would then start to "trickle" energy into the heating zone to maintain the temperature.
That meant that we couldn't just throw the switches on all the heating zones, it would exceed the capacity of our main transformer. So the procedure would be that on guy was sitting out in the transformer building with a walkie-talkie and watch the current gauge, while two others would start switching on heating zones until we hit close to 100kAmps. Then we'd  drink coffee for an hour until those zones had heated up. Rinse & repeat until the morning.
On one of those occassions, we were near completion, alle ovens fully switched on. Then, we suddenly had a blackout.
Now, we had an agreement with the power company that in event of a blackout, we had to give them the go-ahead to switch on power again before they did so. So we walked over to the building with the ovens, intending to switch off all the heating zones again.
Then, the light came back on. Briefly. VERY briefly. This was accompanied by a loud explosion, which was the transformer being blown to bits by the inrush current. It took the small building that held the transformer with it.
The aftermath was mind boggling. We had underground tunnels where copper rails ran the 230V to the other buildings. The rails had evaporated, leaving everything coated with a thin layer of copper. Anyone in there would have been killed instantly. Luckily, noone got injured. It took 5 weeks to get prodcution running again.
Needless to say, they changed to relays instead of switches to power the heaters after that incident. Before that day, there always was "no money" for the upgrade.

[james_s]

The system had no fusing? That's truly bizarre that such a fragile system was ever approved in the first place. Seems like a very obvious need for magnetic controllers like the ones uses for machine tools that will not start up after an interruption.

[BreakingOhmsLaw]

It's not uncommon in industrial environments to have fusing only on the endpoints but not in the distribution.
Management had been warned countless times by engineers that crap needed to be upgraded. They we're always like "Nah, it'll be fine!"

[Red Squirrel]

I was the lighting guy in my high school theatre group.  We were preparing some portable lighting for our tour and I made an extension cord with a dimmer on it, rather simple.  Someone helped me and wired up the end that plugs into the wall while I did the dimmer part.   Once all done I'm holding the metal box that houses the dimmer and go to plug it in.  I turn it on, nothing.  Figure one of us must have miss wired something so I go to unplug it and get a huge shock from arm to arm.  i've had 120v shocks in my time but even to this day that was probably the biggest one.  It shot me back a little and for whatever reason I just had the giggles for like 10 minutes straight.  Almost like being on drugs or something.       Turns out the wiring box was HOT instead of ground.   When I reached over to unplug and touched the metal part of the plug that must have been grounded. 

Learned a good lesson that day, if you are wiring anything electrical make sure you're the one that wires both ends or make sure everyone agrees on what color is hot.  It's not green. 

[MrMobodies]

About 7 years ago a Netgear Prosafe VPN router hung during a firmware update and wouldn't bootup. I soldered on some pins for the serial port and found it had a redboot bootloader. I got some documents from a Intel Coyote board and some other documents on bricked Netgear routers but couldn't upload the firmware using tftp as for file size limits. There was another header on the board so I soldered the pins in there, I got some adapters for it, I can't remember all the details but it didn't have any markings for pin 1. So I measured the voltages and after I finished one of the probes fell from from my hand and touched some part of board, seconds later I saw one of the ram chips glowed red on the edge and it stunk a bit. I quickly unplugged it and I can see it was ruined. I used a heat gun to remove that chip and plugged it back in to see what would happen. It turned on and about 20 seconds later, I heard a pop and the other ram chip exploded leaving a hole and a little flame erupted on the surface.

[VK3DRB]

I went to disconnect the anode wire from a 19" CRT monitor I was working on using my finger. Not only did I forget to discharge the tube first, I forgot to turn off the monitor. Ouch.

Don't work with high voltage when you are tired or distracted.

Similar here. I had a monitor I needed to fix. Powered off and mains disconnected. But I had mistakenly thought I had discharged the anode, but... CRAAACK. OUCH!!!

When I was 16 and working in Myer Children's Shoes Dept over the summer holidays, I stuck my finger in a 240V bayonet light socket to see if there was power there. My arm ached for a week. That should have earned me the Darwin Award.

Around the same time, I bought a cheap Morse code key and decided to tap out Morse code with 240V active on one terminal and neutral on the other. The sparks flew and the cheapo construction of the key, pitted contacts, and several turns of fuse wire provided some resistance.
dit-dit-dah-dit     dah-dah-dah        dah-dah-dah       dit-dah-dit-dit      BANG!

[james_s]

There was another incident I forgot, I had one of those halogen torchier lamps in my office, seemed like I felt a bit of a tingle touching it a few times but didn't think much of it. Then one day I unplugged the monitor from a PC and the shell of the VGA connector brushed the lamp and BANG, the lights went out and the VGA connector now had a big notch out of the shell. I investigated and found that the threaded nipple holding the top of the lamp on the post had cut into one of the wires to the lamp socket so the whole body of the lamp was live for months.

[Berni]

So far my best nomination for a Darwin award was my 230V extension cord repair.

We ware using electric sheers to trim the bushes around the property and eventually dad ended up cutting the extension cord powering said sheers (Happens quite easily if you are not watching out). As expected it tripped fuses and GFCI since the sheers are grounded. So i go get some tools and start fixing the cord by cutting away the short damaged part and wireing the socket on the end. So i sit in the middle of the yard in the grass doing my thing until dad says he needs power for something so i just tell him to go flip the breakers up again. I wire up most of the plug, but then as i get to the live wire and grab it i get the worst shock i ever had, throwing everything and ending up laying on the grass with tingles running down my spine, confused at what happened i get up and then remember that i forgot to unplug the other end of the extension cord before working on it. First thing i did was check my pulse and it seamed normal (apart from being pretty darn fast as you might expect)

The sitting on the grass thing is what made it so bad. While not as bad as some of the horrifying things in this thread, but still easily dangerous enough kill a person.

[Black Phoenix]

Stupid thing I've done:

In 2006, in a Metalworks Show I was working in a CNC Machine Manufacture Company and in said show we had 3 machines working there for show to potencial customers. I was in charge of wiring all the machines, both the 5 Axis one and the Vertical Machine Center were wired correctly, but in the Lathe, I forgot that one of the ballscrew covers would rip apart the 3 phase 380V cable if said cable wasn't correctly in place. So I got around and put a ziptie on it holding the cable. Stupid me at that time, I thought than a simple ziptie would hold a 3 phase 45KVA cable...

Story to know, the ziptie broke and the outer isolation was rubbing against the stainless steel ballscrew cover for 4 days, ripping apart the outer layer and then the insulation of 2 of the phases, with a spark that gone through the cable all the way up to the junction box, a big bang like a shotgun right onto my ears and flash who let me blind for some minutes, killing all the electricity in that show floor (Us and plus 8 other boots), with some flames going up in said junction box for a minute or so.

Power was re-establish 2 hours later. Our equipments didn't suffer anything, just the cable was damaged, but the junction box had to be totally scrapped. After that I got a lot more respect regarding electricity, and now double and triple check everything, even when changing a simple light bulb.

[Vtile]

A thunderstorm that did strike 30m from where I was.

[coppercone2]

Stupid thing I've done:

In 2006, in a Metalworks Show I was working in a CNC Machine Manufacture Company and in said show we had 3 machines working there for show to potencial customers. I was in charge of wiring all the machines, both the 5 Axis one and the Vertical Machine Center were wired correctly, but in the Lathe, I forgot that one of the ballscrew covers would rip apart the 3 phase 380V cable if said cable wasn't correctly in place. So I got around and put a ziptie on it holding the cable. Stupid me at that time, I thought than a simple ziptie would hold a 3 phase 45KVA cable...

Story to know, the ziptie broke and the outer isolation was rubbing against the stainless steel ballscrew cover for 4 days, ripping apart the outer layer and then the insulation of 2 of the phases, with a spark that gone through the cable all the way up to the junction box, a big bang like a shotgun right onto my ears and flash who let me blind for some minutes, killing all the electricity in that show floor (Us and plus 8 other boots), with some flames going up in said junction box for a minute or so.

Power was re-establish 2 hours later. Our equipments didn't suffer anything, just the cable was damaged, but the junction box had to be totally scrapped. After that I got a lot more respect regarding electricity, and now double and triple check everything, even when changing a simple light bulb.

you need heavy zip ties or rubber band insulated steel cable ties. The technology exists but the guns are kind of expensive