WUNderfest

You don't need that much in the case of extreme stupidity. I
investigated such a case, some time ago: a yoof had been sparked quite
badly, and his parents were all for going round to the cricket club
where it happened with pitchforks and torches.

The source of the problem was on the open verandah of the cricket
pavilion, the place where the waiting batsmen would sit, in front of
the scorers window. A cable carrying 240V was visible, hanging from
the ceiling on its way up to the 1500W floodlight mounted on the front
of the building. The outer sheathing of the cable was damaged,
exposing the coloured insulation of the inner cables, which in turn
displayed damage exposing the solid copper conductors.

It was asserted that the cricket club had been negligent in their
maintenance of the building, leading to exposure of live wires which
had allowed inadvertent contact with mains voltage, thus causing the
quite severe injury to said yoofy victim. He was damaged, of that
there was no doubt: the paramedic's report was quite literally
shocking, and the subsequent doctors' reports were wince-inducing. He
had third-degree burns to a hand and a foot, damaging flesh and muscle,
tendon and bone. He also had a quite inexplicable and severe injury to
his head: a broken cheekbone and lower jaw, loss of three teeth and
damage to one eye, the sight of which was at least temporarily lost.

Not a nice catalogue for a teenager to carry for the rest of his life
and the distress and anger of his parents was quite understandable.
The cause of the injuries was electrocution according to the medics,
the uncovering of and liability for the origin was my job. The victim
wasn't capable of talking, although his parents were. Interviewing his
friends who had been present yielded little of any use as they were not
making much sense, being emotional, shocked (but not zapped) and
perhaps deliberately vague.

This was long before the days of CSI, but even without that source of
eduction, I had to try to ascertain cause and liability from a
quasi-forensic examination of the scene. At least the accident site
had been taped off by the police and had remained undisturbed since.
I'm no electrician, but it was apparent that some intentional damage
had been caused to the installation. Talking to the groundsman
revealed that the local kids were in the habit of congregating there,
as there was light and shelter, and it was out of sight from the road
and any other buildings. Security of the site was non-existent as
footpaths ran all around the pitch.

The evidence backed up the groundsman's staement, as there were several
lager cans scattered about, most empty but some full or half-full.
Lots of cigarette ends all over the place, interspersed with roaches
and condom wrappers. Much nefarious after-dark activity, then.

The floodlight was the obvious place to start, so having arranged a
sparky to come round the next day, I had a good look at it. The PIR
sensor had been got at, in that the wires to it had been stripped and
shorted across, presumably to give permanent light rather than
movement-dependent. The fuse to that spur had been removed to "make it
safe" after the event, but no fuse was apparent. It turned out that
the fuse had been replaced with a piece of fencing wire some time
previously, due to "the bloody thing kept blowing". A black mark to
the cricket club, there.

Close examination of the cable to the floodlight revealed that it had
been pulled free of its retaining clips by levering with (probably, by
the marks) a screwdriver - and recently, by the shininess of the pins.
The end board to the ceiling had also been displaced in order to expose
the length of the cable and there were obvious screwdriver and leverage
marks present.

The area of damage to the cable was of the greatest interest,
obviously. Although the outer insulation showed signs of heat damage,
there were more extensive areas of apparently intentional damage to it.
Strange marks, not compatible with any tool I could think of - although
there were slice-type marks which could have been caused by a knife or
screwdriver blade, there were initially shallow and then deeper grooves
gouged into and through the thickness of the outer insulation and at
the point where the outer had been stripped away, the red and black
sleeves were also scratched and grooved around the area where the
copper had been exposed.

I did a lot of head-scratching and walking in small circles that
afternoon, and had to commandeer one of the empty cans to stash all my
fag butts. It was only when my train of thought pulled up at the
platform of logical deduction that I realised how the grroves had been
caused: in the same way as I used to strip wires to install car stereos
and speakers ... put wire end between teeth, bite down and pull, and
the insulation tears apart and slips off, exposing the wires for
twisting and connection. The same marks I would leave were present on
the cabling.

I went home, eventually, via the chippy - but I couldn't eat much as
every time I took a bite of my steak pie, I thought about some silly
little twat biting into a live cable and putting the lights out. I'd
seen pictures of dead rodents, fried by wires exposed by their
compulsive nibbling of insulation - so perhaps yoofy had been lucky,
after a fashion.

I went to see the surgeon on the way into work for a confidential chat,
and put my theory to him. He knew a lot more about electric shock
injuries than I did and educated me as to the type and severity of
damage that might result from exposing frail human flesh to mains
power. I was no stranger to 'getting a belt' from my amateur forays
into extending and modding house wiring, but I'd never suffered more
than inadvertent flight or a good jolt.


When 240V is applied firmly to a conductive body, it seeks to escape to
earth in exactly the same way as a lightning bolt. This is what kills
people, when the current passes through the chest and interferes with
the normal electrical activity that regulates heartbeat (apart from the
burning, exploding and incineration of organs and impact of a thrown
and dropped body).

With my theory and his knowledge, we worked out what had probably
happened. Yoofy, for reasons yet to be ascertained, had climbed up on
the verandah railing, prised off the endmost T&G celing board,
unclipped the cable to the (permanently powered, due to the shorted PIR
sensor)floodlight and had stripped the insulation with his teeth. At
this point, he must have bridged live and neutral with his teeth and
got a good belt of 240V, bearing in mind there was no fuse to blow as
it had been replaced by a length of fence wire.

Possibly, and according to the doctor (due to the extent and severity
of his injuries) probably, his jaws had clamped shut and bitten down
harder on the cable as his nerves were shorted out by the electricity.
He would have died if he hadn't been pulled away by a third party, or
maybe he fell from the railing. The wounds to his hand and foot were
thus exit wounds, caused as the electricity found a route out of his
body; the severe damage to his face being caused by the entry of the
electricity.

We got all that written down in a sensible fashion, then I had to off
to the office and present it to my boss and subsequently his boss.
They both paled very satisfyingly as I told the story, illustrated with
photographs and X-rays of the victim. Then it turned all legal, as the
Solicitor was summoned - as blame could be established it had to be
prosecuted. All I had to do was pin it on a person or body corporate
at the Cricket Club for substituting the fuse for fencing wire - and
then nick the victim for endangering himself.

Then it got very political, as the solicitor got a call to say that the
Chief Exec was barricaded in his office, his secretaries fighting a
losing rearguard action against the Parish Council, the local Masonic
branch and Round Table (fair bit of overlap there) as between them,
they seemed to have control of the Cricket Club Committee - and the
parents of the victim, who'd all landed at his door at 09:00. They
were all lawyered up, too, so the Outer Sanctum was awash with tweed
and twinsets, pearls and passion - along with an awful lot of shiny
shoes and forward-facing haircuts. And the Old Man knew nothing about
it, because I'd been the only one on the case, I'd left the office at
9:30 the previous morning to go and investigate, and hadn't been back
in until right then. Oops.

I did the honourable thing then, leaving my boss and the Director and
Solicitor to go and bail the Chief Exec out while I fucked off back to
the site "to make further investigations". Fortified by a bacon butty
and plastic coffee, I had a good sniff about and took a shitload of
pictures backing up my theory, then set about interviewing everybody I
could think of.

Eventually I caught up with a yoof who admitted to having been there
that night. He had a bandaged hand and turned as white as a sheet when
I cautioned him, then asked about the injury. Screwdriver stab wound,
as it happened. He turned in three other lads, so I grilled all of the
little idiots. It all came out, quite quickly as it happened, as they
were all good kids and far more scared of me and their parents than of
dropping their mates in the shit and being done over for it.

They had been in the process of setting up a 'dry run', a rehearsal for
a 'rave' that they'd been planning to run the following weekend.
They'd decided on the Cricket Club as a venue as they'd been hanging
round there for months and knew it was quiet, well away from the road
amd houses and providing nobody let the cat out of the bag and they
kept it reasonably quiet, they'd get away with it and then deny all
knowledge afterwards. There were a lot of illegal raves going on then,
some in the woods not far away, which they'd blame any noise on.

They needed power, though. A mains-powered CD player, an amplifier and
a big pair of speakers and maybe some lights and they'd be good. The
idea was to tap the pavilion power and make a concealed connection that
they could use. So the hapless victim had undertaken to get the juice,
hadn't he? All very simple: prise a board off, pull the cable free and
rip into it, then twist a four-gang socket connection around the
exposed conductors. Test it, then push it all back up and prop the
board back in place, then they'd be good to go on Saturday night.

They hadn't expected their mate to chomp into 240 volts, though.
Neither had they expected him to jerk off the railing while his eyeball
boiled in its socket, or to see sparks come out of his hand and foot as
he danced the lightning lambada. He'd only dropped off when his "head
exploded" apparently - his teeth must have come out through his cheek,
and that released the cable and he fell to the floor. The Boy Scout
amongst them did CPR on him while another one ran for the phone and
another couple cleared up the evidence.

How scared were they? Sleepless as well, they were. And tearful.

We didn't prosecute anybody in the end, it all went away when the
salient points were made in the right ears. I've been very careful
around electricity since, though.

Oh, that's a bad pun.

 

[tongue-testing a PP3]

Speaking as a pre-teenage transistor radio user (Radio Luxembourg under
the pillow, don'cha know) if you can only feel a tiny tingle or none at
all, the battery's fucked. If you get a definite tingel, it'll go for
one more night of fading and crackling. If it makes the tongue
convulse, that's the one you just liberated from Dad's radio in the
shed and it'll be good all week.

 

I tend to use it to see if the battery is dead, nearly dead or alive. That's
about it. I don't think anyone can get more precise than that.

 

You haven't lived.

You can tell if it's completely dead or has enough oomph to make your
tongue tingle, which is normally good enough to know if it's the
battery or thingy that's dead.

 

Reminds me of the video of that guy standing on top of the Mahananda
Express in India who reaches up and touches the power line.

http://tinyurl.com/og7arg
http://vinothkumarm.blogspot.com/2009/05/electric-train-high-voltage-wire-is.html

 

Well written that man

Bloody good example of why you shouldn't **** with 'lectrons.

Biting it though, what a splendid idea.

It didn't spark off a fork of comments though

 

*DING*

Even in our house, when my dad owned an electronics shop and batteries
were pennies, PP3s still needed to be tingle tested before you switched
the radio on at night

 

My brother still has some nice facial scars from shooting out the
screen of a monchrome CRT with my .22 air rifle and watching the tube
implode then the 'gun' in the neck of the CRT hit him square in the
chops at high velocity. He yelped a bit, so my mum says

 

*DING*

Even in our house, when my dad owned an electronics shop and batteries
were pennies, PP3s still needed to be tingle tested before you switched
the radio on at night
[/QUOTE]

I'm with Ace on this one, it never crossed my mind to shove a battery in
my mouth to test whether it had any charge or not.

Apparently harmless though:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/28/the_odd_body_death_by_battery/

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=104;t=0
00779;p=1

 

singe

 

How does holding onto your bollocks help?

 

By providing a conducting path past them, it avoids suffering Great
Balls Of Fire.

 

And you can **** right orf.

 

Never pass up the chance for a quick furtle, eh

Paul.

 

Goodness gracious!
It means the current does not go straight across the heart.

 

Maybe these people had their hearts in their mouths

can't see it myself either

had dozens of cross body mains shocks too

 

Nah - remarkably easy to get a good enough idea whether the battery's a
goodun or not

 

That's a shocker!

 

been doing it for years - it's sort of a specialty of mine.