True story:
So, I was a first year apprentice-- but I was 26, had 3 kids, and was learning fast.
My company had a contract for the HVAC maintenance on the buildings "outside the fence" at a nuclear plant about 1 hr from my front door. The gig was 5 days/wk, on-site every day, on call on the weekends/holidays. They sent me because I was bright, cheap, and hard-charging... or in steamfitter parlance, "young, dumb, and full of cum".
I was the only guy from my company at the plant, but I had access to a payphone, and my Rolodex and ability to use it was growing daily. The first day I got there, I opened a panel on a 300 ton chiller, and the electrical diagram covered both doors-- about 9 ft high, and 3 ft wide (x2), and printed in maybe #4 font. The equipment was huge, but I was too cocky to be intimidated and I had however long it might take to figure any problem out. It was perfect. I learned quickly. There were 4 people counting on me as the sole means of support, and if I was ever going to make more than $10/hr, I needed to learn and make this thing work.
After I'd been down there by myself for about 9 months, I was getting bored. As bored young men are wont to do, I starting to take some risks to see just how good I was. I was at that tipping point when I knew just enough to be dangerous. Everything was coming fast, and I felt invincible and constrained.
So one bright fall day, I was installing condenser fan speed controllers on A/C units on the main office roof, to allow them to run in low ambient conditions. I got to the main computer room RTU on Thursday, just as they were running payroll.
Knowing what I know now, I'd just move on to the next one, or call it a day. But not then. In 1989, I was young, energetic, and on a mission. I would install that control today-- one way or another. In a fateful bit of hubris, I decided to do it "hot"-- without shutting the unit down, since the unit needed to run to cool the computers, which were cranked up to run the payroll.
Everything was going along swimmingly, until I was snaking a control wire through the back of the panel, and I reached in to grab it. My hand brushed across the compressor contactor, and I tied onto 480v of nice, clean 60 hz power.
Electricity freaks people out, but the thing to remember is-- it's always looking for a ground. The higher the voltage, the harder it looks. Now, your fat fingers are typically a pretty good insulator, and generate a lot of resistance to conductivity. That's why 12 vdc won't even give you a tingle-- there's not enough potential to overcome the resistance in your body to find a ground.
110v will give you a buzz, but it really won't kill you unless you were on your way out anyhow. 480v is not household current. 480v does some pretty funky stuff. 480v can just across carbon-tracking to short to ground. 480v can jump a gap in the right conditions. It really, really wants to find a ground. Your pink parts (and mine on that fine day in 1989) have enough conductivity to create something of a path to ground.
The effect of brushing that contactor was instantaneous. The path to ground was up one arm, across my chest, and down the other arm... which was conveniently grabbing onto a pipe-- a good, solid ground. The physiological effect of becoming a (poor) wire is that all of the muscles that rely on little milli-volt electrical signals to do their thing, instantly constrict. The net effect is that your body puts a death-grip (you see what I did there?) on whatever you are holding, so that you become attached and cannot let go. It's also worth noting that my heart was in the current path, and very likely stopped beating as soon as the current started flowing.
Also worth noting as an aside is that with electricity, current flow through resistance creates heat. That's how an electric heater works. I've explained that the human body is a poor conductor, which means it has a fair amount of resistance. When current starts flowing through that resistor, it creates some heat-- actually, and from experience, a lot of heat. So the way electrocution works is that the power grabs you, constricts your muscles so you can't let go, then cooks you, often from the inside out.
Anyhow, I tied onto this 480 while sitting on a 5-gal bucket with tools in it. My heart stopped beating, but everything else was working just fine. I could feel the 60-cycle buzz in both arms and across my chest. After a few seconds, I could smell my right hand burning. It sounds ridiculous, but my life flashed before me. All of it. I wondered if I'd trip the breaker before I burned into a pile of smoking charcoal. I looked at the clouds and wondered if it would rain in the morning. I saw each of the faces of my kids, and wondered who they'd turn out to be. I opined that this was a really stupid way to die. I was glad I'd purchased life insurance.
But there was a part of me that was fighting like mad to live.
Somehow, I stood up, and began to lever my forearms against the top of the unit. My forearms became a shorter path to ground, so I suppose my grip was loosened a bit, but I couldn't tell any difference. After maybe 10 seconds of being "on", I pried my hands off the ground (and the power) by using the top of the unit as a fulcrum, and my shoulders as the power-point. I was able to break my grip on the pipe that was grounding me
... and just like that I was off, laying on the roof, not bleeding because the chunks of my hand that had been burned away were cauterized. I thought about putting the panel back on the unit, but I didn't. I climbed down my ladder, and walked over to the first-aid station.
At that point the medical team went into full-on 911/idiot-on-the-loose mode. They loaded me into an ambulance, and drove me an hour to the hospital closest to me (I insisted they take me there, so my wife wouldn't need to drive). They insisted on keeping me overnight, but I checked myself out the next day.
I never had to go back to the plant. The entire workforce of the facility (I mean every last man-- probably 3000 of them) went through 2-days of "electrical safety training". A co-worked finished installing the speed-controller. I went back to work after agitating that I didn't want to sit around, and that I needed the paycheck.
I went on to other things. Clinton Nuclear Power Plant continued to generate nice, clean 60 HZ electricity
... but I can claim, that like the above meme-- I was most definitely the reason for the company safety video. Just call me "Safety Stan".
