Originally posted by darkage
I had once 220V trough my hand, not a good feeling toasted half my hand and my hair was like frankenstein style...no burns left from it:)
In the Navy, we were taught that before you work with a circuit, you deenergize the circuit (duh) and 'tag it out'. Tagging it involved putting a nonconductive dumdum in the circuit box in place of the normal pass-thru shunt. A red tag hung from the dumdum to let everyone else know that it was there for a reason.
One day, during a cutover from the offbase mains feed to an on base diesel generator, one of the electricians mates forgot to tag out one of the 440/3-phase circuits. When he went to transfer the mains from the outside line, he learned, involuntarily, how to fly. I think he would have flown farther, but the maintenance spaces we were in were only twelve feet across. The medical corpsman zapped him with the defibrillator to reset his heart rhythm and he survived.
I have a healthy respect for electricity after seeing THAT.
