Question About How Getting Electrocuted Works

[tooki]

It states the video "wasn't made available in our country".

That's an odd message that I haven't seen.

Really? It’s not that rare.

[MarkT]

If their bodies are not touching neutral or Earth ground, why would they get a shock?

Standing on the floor means your feet are earthed if your footwear isn't a really good insulator.  You might think modern rubber soles insulate well, but in practice they get moisture in the foam and do not insulate much - I've been zapped in trainers and can atest to this - never trust a farmer to unplug a cable before unreeling it across a field(!)

[bostonman]

I'll admit that I got a bit carried away with the exaggerated examples of a human "flying" onto a high voltage line.

The initial question (which got answered in this thread) was asked of me when the person said she couldn't release her hands when she got electrocuted at work. Now I've learned the muscles contract, and, as I knew, although technically every 8.3ms the voltage is 0v (which is an extremely short time) and a person should be able to pull away, the muscles will cause the person to grip the object(s). The other anomalies of getting hurt come into play such as falling off a ladder and other situations, but the main answer is the muscles contract.

As for getting electrocuted, safety is key, but we all know that regardless of measures put in place, electricity is going to try and find a pathway to ground. I never considered shoes as being a conductor, but this is why accidents happen.

This is why i was trying to understand a hypothetical situation of eliminating "ground" and "neutral", and what a human would feel touching/grabbing/sitting on a power line comprised of high voltage. One time I asked my PhD co-worker a similar question and sometimes he'd answer questions with a sarcastic answer causing me to wonder if he was joking.

If I remember correctly, he mentioned a human would get zapped, and, when I asked about a bird, he said they have less capacitance.

This caused me to wonder: where/how is electricity going through my body if I'm sitting on a power line without ground anywhere near; hence why I presented such a hypothetical scenario.

[johansen]

Thr current does not go anywhere except that there is a concentration or a deficit of electrons on the surface of the body.. like a static charge.

But it is not flowing out of the person to ground, however it is flowing into and out of the person, to the tune of 1 to 10 milliamps as i previously showed

[Berni]

The current is caused by extra electrons being packed into your body because the higher voltage can squeeze more electrons into the same space, on the opposite side of the cycle electrons are pulled out of your body. Electrical current is electrons moving along a conductor so that's where you get current from.

Tho to be more accurate there are also other contributions like capacitance from you being near other objects. This causes an electrostatic force that can pack even more electrons onto the surface of your body because they are attracted to opposite charges in objects around you. This is why capacitors are made from closely spaced parallel plates, it exploits this effect to produce a large capacitance in a small space. There are also no electrons "flowing trough" the capacitor, since they can't jump the gap between the plates, it is just extra free electrons being packed into the plates, or pulled off them.

Antennas are similar where you just push AC current into a wire and that current just magically disappears. That's because what you were actually driving is the antennas self capacitance, however there it doesn't look like capacitance because the energy is radiated into the air as electromagnetic waves, so the antenna looks like a resistor.

[TimFox]

The human body, for electrical purposes, is a very lossy dielectric, with DC conductivity through its saline content.  At higher frequencies, it does not conduct so much as a container of saline, due to cellular walls.  When being electrocuted, the resistance between points on the body surface is dominated by the high resistance through the skin, which depends strongly on how moist the skin is (perspiration and moisture).