Texas girl electrocuted while using cellphone in bathtub

[Poopymonster]

Funerals aren't free.

That's why you have life insurance. Unless your policy doesn't cover "You were fucking stupid"

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I suppose we need a health and safety class at young ages in school to teach this stuff.

Went to school in a shithole small town in Michigan, early/mid 90s. They covered the exact reasons why miss water and mister electronics can't be friends. Mandatory senior year class.

[Viikkis]

Dumb ways to die so many dumb ways to die...

[BloodSense]

Exactly.
It's not the voltage that kills you it's the amperage.
Here in the US we have 120v at 20 amps. I believe Europe has 240v at 10 amps.
Yes, amps are what kill you. BUT... you need a high voltage for the current to overcome the resistance of your skin.
Its all about Ohm's Law.
Voltage = Current * Resistance or Current = Voltage / Resistance
Your skin normally provides between 100K and 200K ohms of resistance, depending on genetics, atmospheric conditions, humidity, etc. 100,000 is a good estimate for most people.
So a painful shock might be your car battery. 12 volts = 100,000 ohms * 0.00012 amps
0.00012 is nothing. If you have dry skin and clothes, not wearing any metal, ear rings, dangling your PA over a car battery... you'll be OK.

The 'sweet spot' to kill someone is 0.1 to 0.2 amps across the heart.
So let's look at you grabbing a live wire in your house:
120 volts = 100,000 ohms * 0.0012 amps
OK 0.0012 sucks. But it's not fatal.

But let's say that your hands are wet, or you're wearing conductive jewelery, or you're otherwise being a dumbass around your home electrical circuit. Wet hands with oily or broken skin will drop your skin's ohms to right around 1K...
120 volts = 1,000 ohms * 0.12 amps
Whoopsie daisy you are dead!

That's right, the home electrical circuit puts out exactly enough juice to put between 0.1 and 0.2 amps across your internal organs if you artifically lower your skin's resistance. Potentially putting your heart into fibrillation

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/tex...hms-law-again/

Therese actually quite a bit more to it than that. Realistically it only takes half a milliamp to stop the human heart, but its more dependent on the time the current spends trans-versing the body, and the path which it takes that determines whether a shock is fatal. Water by itself is also a pretty shitty conductor of electricity, and its actually the impurities in it which do most of the work, namely the oils and dirt from your skin while taking a bath. For that reason its entirely possible to get electrocuted with dry skin, even at 120v AC and the reason you don't hear about it more often is because 120 volts is usually not enough to cause the involuntary muscle contractions that cause someone to clench their fist onto a conductor effectively causing them to get "hung up".

Oddly enough a lot of things in these stories don't jive because most news sources omit pretty glaring details. For instance, only the primary side(the side you plug in) of a cell phone charger is 120v AC, the output or secondary side is normally between 5v, and 10v DC, at between 1 and 3 amps, which is nowhere near the voltage needed to overcome the natural resistance of the human skin even when wet. Furthermore, the National Electrical Code for perhaps the last 25 years or so has required that ground-fault circuit interruption protection be installed on all bathroom receptacles and any receptacle accessible from atop a kitchen counter, normally in the form of a GFCI receptacle in older installations, or GFCI Circuit breakers in some newer installs. So in essence you would need basically a perfect storm of shit in order to electrocute yourself in the tub, namely have your charger plugged into an extension cord, which was resting on the edge of the tub, and plugged into a none GFCI protected receptacle, likely outside the bathroom.

[Tziva]

We don't need a thread that is just a bunch of people chatting about how stupid a dead child was here.