Ah, humans. Even when there are no cultural / group loyalty / greed / etc. reasons for a person to behave very differently from how they clearly know they should...they still tend to behave very differently from how they clearly know they should.
...and the more we try to legislate away any possible source of danger we might encounter in our day-to-day lives, the less prepared we will be for places where nature is left to fend for itself.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an argument. "We need to keep life more dangerous in general so that when we hit special cases it'll be easier to deal with" strikes me as generally doing more harm than good because our day to day is going to cause more harm and those special cases are always going to be special.
Unless you have specific examples that you're thinking of here.
I don't think he was making that argument. Someone who climbs mountains every week is less likely to be hurt in a given mountain climb than someone who doesn't but that doesn't mean that the best idea for safety is to climb mountains often.
> Someone who climbs mountains every week is less likely to be hurt in a given mountain climb
On any given mountain climb, maybe. But overall? I don't know. A coworker of mine who liked mountaineering made lots of acquaintances in that lifestyle, and he told me they are often missing limbs and show lots of ugly scars, and have lots of near-death anecdotes about themselves. I'm talking about people who do this either for a living or as an all-consuming lifestyle, not casuals.
He told me of a girl, a pro mountaineer, who was missing several fingers and had plenty of teeth knocked out. Her skin looked terrible, too. And he told me this is common. Her boyfriend was also a mountaineer, because that's yet another common fact: mountaineers band together, it's difficult to be in a couple with one if you don't find that lifestyle fascinating.
Another friend who does parachuting (from airplanes) told me he knows lots of people who do BASE jumping (or even worse, those senseless "wingsuit" jumpers) and they tend to die young. They do a lot of it, always chasing a more extreme high, until one day they simply don't make it.
What limits are those? The "I shouldn't have fallen off the monkey bars" lesson isn't applicable to the wilderness, is it? What's the carry over? "Broken arms hurt"? I don't think people are unaware of that. Also, what will break your arm at 10 is different than what will break your arm at 20.
Doing risky things in an environment where you can get help vs. an environment where you're on your own. There are good lessons to learn by taking physical risks in more controlled environments. Like learning not to take dangerous and/or unnecessary risks when you're on your own because you know you might get yourself into a situation where you depend on help.
The "don't put this plastic bag on your mouth" warnings come about because the public supports those laws/cases. Those people are at the point were they rely on other to be responsible for them rather than using common sense. Those laws/cases create an environment where people come to expect warnings for everything rather than rely on their own common sense.
I do think you're right that day to life would cause more harm without any warnings, at least for certain people. The people who are responsible for themselves are generally going to be ok in either situation. The people who are happy-go-lucky and rely on others to think for them and arlt high risk in either situation, sometimes regardless of if warnings are present.
Are those warning labels there because they've been proven to be effective, or because someone sued and that's their way to mitigate that? I have a problem visualizing the venn diagram of people who are so stupid they'll put the bag in their mouth but also people who will listen to the words written on said bag.
I mean, all the time people slip and fall on ice and then sue. You can see it, you walk on it, but you don't assume the risk and force the property owner to pay. I assume that most warnings are just there because someone got sued or doesn't want to get sued.
People do, it's true. The question I have is would a "Danger! Slippy ice!" actually stop people from hurting themselves? Because I don't think it would, it would just make the sueing harder.
For some yes, for some no. My point is that having that warning won't help the reckless. It's not needed for the intelligent. It might help those people who have come to expect warnings for things. However, it hurts them overall because it's a common risk and other areas won't have those warnings possible causing then to act without caution and getting hurt there. So the warnings might help in a specific Cass for a very small group of people, but will overall be a negative if the person encounters that risky situation when it doesn't have a warning. I hate to say it since it tends to have political tones, but sheeple - people who just do whatever they're told and don't think for themselves - will increase as we remove the need to think to survive. Supposedly wild animals are more intelligent than similar domestic animals.
The plastic bag warning is aimed at parents of children mostly. Babies, love crinkly things. I know that my son when he started crawling would seek out the on floor garbage cans to play with the bags we used as a liner.
If you have someone who is not thinking about the ramifications, they would let the kid play with the bag, kid would end up putting it over their head(yay, surround sound) and some percentage would die.
There are similar warnings on buckets, about drowning. Kids that age love water, if they manage to get themselves head first in a 5 gallon bucket it only takes an inch of liquid of so for them to drown. Most people wouldn't think it takes so little.
In theory, children that young shouldn't be unattended anyways. The onus shouldn't be on the company for not printing a warning, but on the parent for a lack of supervision (aka negligence).
And people still sue even if a warning was present. And nobody is saying "ha, darwin". They're saying stuff like "why weren't you supervising your 1 year old" or "how could we anticipate that someone would get [object] stuck in their butt".
Depends on your worldview. If you believe that all regulation is inherently bad, you might be searching for reasoning chains that lead to the conclusion that she died because of it.
Feels like a serious reach, and trying to shoehorn unrelated issues into a discussion they don't belong. The author goes over her repeated brushes with death - and the warnings she received prior - and they don't seem to deter her from putting herself in more situations. Making everyone else unsafe isn't the solution. (If a "solution" is even needed. I think she's just describing her own instance of human behavior.)
Ok, maybe my statement was too generic... it's more about the environment in cities that looks suspiciously similar to nature but isn't - trees that are tested regularly for stability, paths that are kept free of roots or stones you might trip over, guardrails and warning signs everywhere there might be the slightest possibility of danger etc.
Do your research before getting into rivers. My local river has several gauges and hotlines you can call to get dam releases. They also have a chart of the water release amounts and if you could paddle/float/canoe/kayak etc. It even has a turbidity gauge that will show you if any harmful bacteria is present, we have issues with fertilizer runoff and e-coli. It's a rather mundane river in an area not as known as Glacier National Park.
>The river was swollen with alpine runoff.
Red flags right immediately.
If you ever hear 3 horns blasts, get out immediately. A dam might release.
I would NOT go down any side forks. Just like the author I have been messed up and thrown off my kayak by downed trees on a fork. Luckily the water was waist deep and I could stand right away.
Acquaintance did some suburban kayaking and didn't see a 3ft drop (some kind of dam or culvert under a bridge) until too late. The fluid mechanics of that drop are such that there is a vortex at the base that makes it difficult to get out. He was able to stand but just barely - scary to think how close a call that was in a pretty innocuous looking setting.
Yeah those things are notorious for that. Place I grew up in had a lot of small rivers you could pretty much wade across most of the year. But you'd still hear of drownings every once in a while and if it wasn't a small child it was always someone going over a low head dam.
I almost drowned on a beach without surveillance, jumping into the surf waist high, for fun, until suddenly the receding water pulled me just a few meters further away and now I couldn't touch the floor anymore, and was slowly being pulled further and further away from the beach. My girlfriend of the time was on the beach far enough away that she couldn't hear or grasp that I was struggling. By luck and after perhaps 10 minutes of fighting, I managed to move sideways and forward by persistence until I could touch the ground again and walk out. I was completely exhausted and I'm not sure how much longer I could have persisted like this. Just as I exited a few locals were arriving in haste for me. Apparently they had seen me struggling to come back. I'm guessing they had witnessed tragedies there before, because whereas my girlfriend hadn't picked up that I was in trouble, they had.
Sounds like you encountered a "rip" [0]; usually letting it take you out and then swimming after the current eases is the safest thing to do. At school (Oceania) we get taught this as part of water safety, but I suppose it would be a foreign concept to many people, particularly those not living near the coast.
I was taught to immediately start swimming parallel to the beach. Some rip tides can take you very far away very quickly, enough that nobody would be able to get to you without a boat, and that is if they were looking at you. Best advice is to swim parallel to the beach, while remaining calm and swiming at a pace you can hold. Do not sprint-swim due to fear.
Swimming parallel to the beach will get you out of it, but it could be a struggle depending on the width of the rip and the size of the waves. Getting past the break first is often easier since then you can swim parallel to the beach and away from the rip without having to deal with waves breaking on you.
The key in surf is to never fight against the rip. While it can feel scary to get pulled out, remember that 99% of the time, it will end after you are pulled past the break, at which point you can swim laterally a bit and then go back in with help from the waves. Breaking waves naturally create alternating channels in the sand that either push you towards the shore or pull you back out to the break.
The other 1% of the time is when you are close to the mouth of a bay or some other feature that creates a current independent of the dynamics in the surf zone. You'll know that's the case if the current stays strong after you're past the break. If it's too strong for you to swim against it, then you're in trouble and should start waving for help.
A couple hours in even moderately chilly water -- to include off the coast of California -- will give you hypothermia in an hour, often as little as 30 minutes. If you have to float for 2 hours without being able to get out you'll have a problem.
Rip tides pull out, so let them pull you past the break then swim side to side. You shouldn't need more than 15-20 min to get past the worst of it, and can work laterally to inbound waves.
I watched numerous tourists do this in Cancun from our penthouse rental on vacation. In one case, a full-grown man was swept out approximately 100m and kept getting tugged and dashed by the waves as he fought them. A lifeguard kept whistling to him from shore and motioning to move perpendicular to the current to get back to shore, and he finally did.
We also saw lifeguards retrieve a drowned child. They worked on him for about fifteen minutes in front of the parents before stopping, and the ambulance took him away.
The beaches were marked with red flags as far as the eye could see, along with signs in English and Spanish clearly indicating that this meant swimming was prohibited, as it was unsafe. Many people paid no heed to the warnings.
Why not just tell people never to swim? There are never "no waves" when you are at an ocean beach. These sorts of absolutist rules of thumb are of no benefit to anyone but the people offering them up.
People will go swimming in the ocean and in all myriad of bays and estuaries that are more than capable of having enough surf to kill them depending on the weather. You just need to exercise good judgement about how much surf is too much.
It is fairly safe at most public beaches if:
* you follow the posted signs for rules (e.g. where it's safe to dive, staying in marked areas), flags for current conditions
* pay attention to weather conditions
* know (roughly) when and how much of a change the tide will bring
Unfortunately, a significant number of people don't follow the rules, or underestimate the risk.
There is a reason many public beaches located within an urban center have lifeguards and patrols.
Drowning doesn't look like drowning. The thing they show in movies or on TV is not what happens so most people have no clue when someone is in trouble. In some cases kids drown in pools while parents are not only present but looking right at them. In others like yours people wave and smile from the beach as the person in the surf is about to die.
Another one is Bondi Beach - you can find episodes on YouTube. There are a bunch of examples of rescues and how little notice any of the people on the beach or other swimmers nearby give to people struggling.
This interactive website lets you test your ability to spot drowning and develop a sense of what to watch out for - can you see which person in the wave pool is drowning before the lifeguard blows the whistle and jumps in?
I used to live on a popular surfing beach in Australia. Every day people would see the surfers and think it was a good place to swim and get into trouble (In general, if you see surfers then it's a bad place to swim). Always swim near the lifeguard's tower and pay attention to the flags
Yep! We used to ride the rip out on boards as it was easier than paddling through the waves. Dart across once you're out the back then catch a wave in.
Back in the 1980s, a number of soldiers drowned in the hydraulic below the dam at the Little Falls pumping station on the Potomac. One of Tufte's books (I think Envisioning Information) includes the illustration of the effect that The Washington Post published shortly after that.
Yep. A couple of girls got killed in Pittsburgh a few years back. They were kayaking down the river and didn't realize a dam was ahead. People die all the time in nature for lack of preparedness because they don't know the environment they are getting into and they don't know their limitations. This also endangers rescuers.
Seems about five others of us also linked his video in this thread :) Guess you’re experiencing the Baader-Meinhof effect, AKA the frequency illusion [1].
It is interesting that Practical Engineering is an often-cited channel on HN. Not surprising, but rather a good indication of its content, quality, and value.
I crossed a small dam solo hiking the Wichita Mountains. Not the one at Kite Trail on the Bison Trail Loop (Lost Lakes) which is wide and dry, but completely off trail since I had to get off trail to avoid bison. It was mossy with very little traction and I almost slipped. Brushed it off as an annoyance since I didn't get wet.
Watched this video a year later and it made me think... how deep was that water, and was it really as calm as it seemed? Yikes.
I’ve done a decent amount of white water and stories like this make me shiver. If you’re in moving water, standing is surprisingly dangerous. Float or swim (depending on the current) to calm water and get out there.
If you stand (and especially walk) in a fast current, you’re asking to get your foot caught and then drowned.
My story was short. A tree at chest level knocked us over a couple feet from the end of fork. We floated a couple feet until we were dumped back into the main channel were there is little to no current. My heel caught a treble hook from my fishing pole. I had to dog paddle the kayak a couple feet to the bank and get the hook out of my heel.
There aren't even any classed rapids in this area its more of a lazy river thing. An hour or so away there are some cool rapids leftover from prior Olympic Games that has a consistent dam release.
What's amazing from this article, and from others like it, is that even being reasonably knowledgeable is not a guarantee of anything. I mean, better be knowledgeable, of course -- but even people who should know better die and get caught in freak accidents. Or simply, one day they let their guard down. After plenty of near death experiences, the author of this article was still doing some dumb shit, she hadn't learned the lesson by her own admission.
This isn't an argument against research; of course you should know the dangers and treat the environment carefully. But even this isn't a guarantee of survival.
"Research" means something different than "being reasonably knowledgeable" in this context. You might be familiar with a certain river, but "Is the dam going to release water today" and "how much runoff from the mountains is there today" are question that you should still research before going out.
Looks entirely harmless but is incredibly dangerous in some parts. Apparently the river "turns on it's side" creating a narrow but very deep stream with very fast underwater currents.
Also it's deceptive as hell. See all the stories here about strange pockets of rivers that almost killed people, or the author's own note about the 252 degree hot pockets in Yellowstone Lake with an average survival time of 20 minutes.
I think when people see water they're tempted to think it's a nice pool or a lazy river to enjoy - when really it's most likely a death trap.
This is one of those lies right up there with "the box cutter and the step stool are the most dangerous tools"
Frequency/exposure matters. A lot of people swim. Not a lot of people choose the more extreme hike that's borderline on rock climbing.
The danger of the typical or average swim is basically nil. Worrying about it other than just knowing there's baseline danger (that you can amplify by poor decisions if you choose to, but same goes for everything in life).
It's more obvious how a cliff is dangerous versus a seemingly calm body of water. Thus people are less wary about water, and more people die that way.
It's not a lie, because the results are the results. And spreading awareness of the outcomes is about reducing the exposure that you mentioned, especially amongst the unprepared/unskilled.
It doesn't take much. I live near the Potomac, just upstream of Great Falls and DC. People drown on the flat stretches every summer. Usually a family picnic, somebody goes for a quick dip, and never returns. It looks calm. It isn't.
And just downstream, world class kayakers paddle Great Falls for fun and practice.
It's wild (and sad) to think about the two groups of river users.
First I thought that I'm lucky, because I'm not a big outdoor kind of guy. Then I remembered that I've had like 4 close calls while motorbiking, so to each their own risk I guess.
(Let's not forget how many people die per year just by falling from a step-ladder etc.)
Some tips on where to begin to learn more about nature and survive in the wild? Maybe an REI class?
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that should I ever venture out into the wilderness, I would definitely not survive. I lack basic survival skills and nature would eat me alive.
That being said, I always admired folks who could go camping for days (or weeks), who could cook up a warm (and edible) meal over a campfire.
The first thing to learn is to have respect for the harsh reality of the environment. You’d be surprised how many people get killed because they don’t (looking at you Christopher McCandless). So your awareness itself is already a good start.
I don't understand why McCandless was idolized (I do know there was backlash from actual knowledgeable people, like park rangers). He purposefully put himself in harm's way and didn't have any relevant skills that would have helped him survive. So what's admirable or romantic about the way he died?
Well he most likely died due to poisoning himself with a misidentified plant that was only ever documented as dangerous in an ancient encyclopedia over 100 years old. Nothing romantic about it, but nothing screaming "no relevant skills", either.
Don't think this is the part people romanticize, I think it's the whole "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't think I want one" and the "Instead, I will walk into the wild" that does it for people.
I think the plant itself was a detail. He was likely to hurt himself one way or the other. He was cut off from civilization or help, he didn't know about relatively nearby crossings (having "ditched the map" on purpose) and he had no survival skills.
He could have poisoned himself with something else, or been attacked by a wild animal, or treaded on some treacherous ground and broken a leg, all of this outside the reach of human help, and he did this on purpose.
> "Instead, I will walk into the wild"
But this is what I don't get. "I will commit suicide by walking into the wild without resources or knowledge", what's admirable about that? He was basically playing Russian Roulette! I mean, I get that suicide itself is the stuff of romantic ideation, maybe that's the thing?
You know, I wanted to type out some sassy reply, but I keep failing to put my finger on what's romantic about it (even though I guess I "relate" to that position).
I don't think it's the suicide aspect, and - maybe besides the point - personally I don't think the guy was trying to die (not anymore or less than a freeclimber).
Maybe the Webster 1913 definition for "romantic" can help shed a light:
> Characterized by strangeness or variety; suggestive of adventure; suited to romance; wild; picturesque; -- applied to scenery; as, a romantic landscape.
I know what "romantic" means. I don't think McCandless was a romantic; I think he was reckless. His romanticism was entirely artificial -- Krakauer's opinion that he "threw away the map" on purpose since there are no really unexplored lands anymore hints at this -- and he didn't need to live this rough life, he strived to put himself in harm's way. Someone who crosses the highway with their eyes closes is not a romantic, they are simply stupid.
And like I said in another comment, I think he completely misread Jack London and failed to learn the lesson from that writer: that wilderness is ruthless and will kill you the minute you let your guard down, or simply out of bad luck.
The only reason he was even still there when he died is because he didn't have a map of the area and thus couldn't figure out how to cross the river to get back.
Zooming out a bit, you could also say he died because he churned the philosophy of using the aids and crutches of civilization to maximize his hedonistic well-being at all cost - which is maybe a more interesting and ambiguous point to discuss than whether maps are useful ;)
Poisoned by legumes, that most people seen (wrongly) as safe to eat, just because they are legumes
Many herbivores are poisoned only when desperated to find alternative sources of food. He probably tried and failed to find other sources of food, so he ate legumes, that caused serious damage in their nervous system, and left him unable to walk and hunt anymore
You mistake idolization and fascination. People (myself included) are fascinated by his calling to quit society and to act on it, but I never saw someone idolizing him
Ok, so it's fascination. And a heavy dose of romanticization.
Yet McCandless was essentially reckless rather than heroic. It's not that hard to die if you put yourself in an extreme situation, without preparing yourself or having any safeguards. It's a form of Russian roulette rather than "rejecting society"; though, I suppose, suicide is the ultimate form of rejecting society.
I see that he liked Jack London. So do I! However, I must wonder how thoroughly he read London's work, especially his Klondike gold rush stories, because very often in the stories the main character ends up dead, defeated by bad luck and an unsympathetic wilderness which is hostile to clueless men. I mean, did he read "To Build a Fire"?
Look to your local Community College or State University extension office. Many of them offer outdoors classes.
The problem with private wilderness survival classes you may find in the community, even the light versions, is that they tend to come with a very particular political slant. And that slant tends toward the paranoid.
That paranoia is the creeping realization that civilization coddles us to the point of uselessness in the face of trivial survival challenges, and that nature actually cares not one jot for your continued existence as a living being. I’d modify your statement to say not that nature is trying to kill you, but that you’re irrelevant. The difference is deeper than it might at first seem.
> civilization coddles us to the point of uselessness in the face of trivial survival challenges
I scoff at this notion. Each of us is a weak, fragile hairless monkey. There is no such thing as “civilisation”. It is just other monkeys just like you and me caring about fellow monkeys so much that we go to extremes to protect each other. Civilisation is the term one uses to describe these combined efforts. It is not something which makes you weak, it is the way we choose to cling together and protect each other. It is our way to face the survival challenges.
Sadly the paranoia in outdoors survival groups tends to be less about nature, and more about the government coming to take your guns and homes and what-not.
Although, that is my experience in multiple mid-western states; so it may not translate to other parts of the country.
I've done a lot of ultralight backpacking. That community is, in general, on the more liberal/hippie side of the spectrum. One of the funniest things I noticed however is that the far other end, the doomsday-preppers, start to share a lot of the same tools and food. For example I was making my own freeze-dried meals, and most of the sites where you could buy the food were targeted towards preppers. A little bit of if you go so far right (or left) you end up on back on the other side.
> Having someone experienced within arms reach would be the best bet when/if shit hits the fan.
Not just that. One can learn a lot from the mere presence of someone more experienced. How do they prepare, what do they bring, how do they pace themselves, how do they make decisions. Basically it makes it more likely that you don’t even get near the bad situation.
Garmin GPS coordinates + downloaded topos got me out of a dicey situation slightly lost solohiking in the Grand Canyon. Similar situations when the trail flooded in Ouachita National Forest. It's a must have for solo hikers.
“out of cell range” is not a great measure for deep nature imo. On the California coast, for example, you can lose cell range without even leaving the road.
And in the Alps, you have areas with so many tourists the path is affectionally called a highway, but it would take 2 hours of hiking to get into cell range because mountains block signals.
I think it depends more on how many people you’re likely to meet per hour than cell range.
True, but "out of cell range" is a helpful indicator; if you're in cell range you can call for help. There are places out of range that are perfectly safe (due to people passing by) and there are places in cell range that I'd be worried to travel without others; but as a rule of thumb I think it works.
This also goes for driving - especially in winter! Do not leave the commonly travelled roads if you don't know what you're doing! A stuck car gets freezing cold quite fast in many places.
I disagree with #1, I live in Colorado and many trails here are out of cell range. My advice here is either get a satellite phone and/or do some research about where you are going and only go if it's a well travelled trail. I often go out by myself into places without cell coverage but I always research the place to make sure that if I run into issues, there will almost certainly be someone there to help me. It's not a perfect system but it's better than going in blind somewhere.
Also, pack 2-3x the water you think you will need.
If you’re in the Swiss Alps, have the REGA app installed and active, pay the incredibly reasonable membership fee, but for goodness sake do not treat it like your personal helicopter rescue service.
Taking a class, hiring a guide, or going with an experienced friend would all be a great way to get started.
If you wanted to bootstrap by yourself or with other inexperienced friends- I would start by getting a car accessible campsite, and then use that as a base camp. Go on small hikes that take you back to your site. Very few survival skills are needed for that sort of thing- you can get started with a cooler, a grill, and a bundle of firewood.
If you enjoy that, then start using more primitive tools and trying larger hikes in future trips, and you can work your way up to backpacking or whatever your goals are
There are millions of people practicing outdoor activities without problems, you would do fine if you don't do something stupid for getting views on youtube or tiktok.
(and cooking a meal on a camping stove is just cooking, nothing magical)
Start small. Buy a decent tent, sleeping pad, and sleeping bag (if you like REI, their people are usually very good at helping you find what you need in your budget). Find a local car camping campground (such as a state park) and just go car camping. For those unfamiliar, car camping is where you go to a campground that you drive up to your campsite (and you are rarely very far from some sort of civilization). Before you go think of all the things you'd want with you (food, water, entertainment, etc.) and pack it up in your car (cold food in cooler with ice, of course). If things go wrong (which they probably will at first, and that's fine), you can always choose to drive to the store if you forgot something or go home if something else happens. Most of these campgrounds have small hiking trails as well. Start small (<2 miles) and bring some water. When leaving, practice the principles of leave no trace and make sure the campsite looks how you found it when you leave.
Do a few of these and try something new out every time. Maybe you want to work on building skills like fire making. Maybe you want to try out new equipment such as using a camping stove with dehydrated food instead of a fire. Or try out techniques like packing all of your stuff in a backpacking pack and take it on hikes to see how what you'd need (and possibly not need) go backpacking.
Once you feel comfortable start expanding out. Maybe try a day hike where you cover more ground (but don't overdo it at first, stay within what you know for a fact you are capable of). Do an out and back one where you start at your car, and end back up at your car. Maybe try going for one night of backpacking to "wilderness" camp sites at a local park. These sites are usually a short hike from where you'll park with no amenities. Practice your skills. Enjoy the nature.
From there figure out what you are enjoying and maximize that. Do you like the hiking? The camping? Just hanging out with friends around a campfire? Do that. It's not about how extreme you can make it, it's about what you like. If hiking makes you miserable and all you want to do is sleep outdoors for a few nights with a stable fire, then there is no shame in sticking to car camping. There will be purists who look down on it, but who cares?
Try new things, find what you enjoy, and don't push yourself more than you know you are capable of.
A lot is just experience, and others have given great advice on getting started. I want to add a few rules, in no particular order, that I find valuable. Some of the rules are slightly overkill for basic drive-in camping, but they're worth following anyway.
- If you go hiking, take a small backpack. It should have an extra layer of clothing, some snacks, and water, at minimum.
- Never eat anything unless you are 100% certain you know what it is and it is non-toxic. Only drink from a lake or stream in an emergency, and then purify or boil the water if possible.
- Always bring a hat. Like the girl in the article, I've found myself in unexpected relentless sun.
- Wear sensible shoes. The definition of 'sensible' depends on what you're doing, but when in doubt go slightly overkill.
- Never go into nature alone. Ideally, go with a group of at least 3 people. Then if 1 person is seriously hurt, 1 person can stay with them and the last person can go for help.
- Always tell someone where you are going and when you plan to return. When you get back, tell them you're safe. For a simple weekend campout, that means telling a friend or family member. For a strenuous full-day hike, that means stopping at a ranger station before and after the hike.
- Never go off trail (both because it's easy to get lost, and because it's bad to trample mother nature).
- Always have maps - ideally paper ones. Even for a simple trail, pull out a cell phone and take a picture of the map at the trailhead.
- Bring more supplies (including food and water) than you think you need. With each trip you'll learn more about what you wish you had and what you brought but didn't use.
- Bring backups of critical things. Two flashlights, two ways to start fires, and two knives of some description (they don't have to be fancy).
- Have a realistic view of your limits (and your gear's limits). Seeing a nifty rock face doesn't mean you know how to climb it. Even if you know how, you probably don't have climbing equipment with you.
- Animals are not your friends. Research in advance what animals to expect wherever you're going, and what precautions to take. Camping in bear country is different than camping in raccoon country, for example.
- Research where you're going and pack accordingly. Is there running water? If not, plan how you will get and purify water. Are fires allowed? If not, plan how you will cook your food.
If this whole list is intimidating, just start simply and enjoy figuring things out - it can be a lot of fun as long as you come prepared (and try to over plan and over-pack at first while you learn).
>> - Animals are not your friends. Research in advance what animals to expect wherever you're going, and what precautions to take. Camping in bear country is different than camping in raccoon country, for example.
Being an Australian it always entertains when you hear Americans talking about how everything in Australia is out to kill you... Truth is, almost nothing in Australia is out to kill you unless you really annoy it and you are far more likely to have problems with dying of exposure and heat exhaustion.
In the US on the other hand it seems you have lots of real predators who are out looking for a free feed that you need to take real care about. I had no idea raccoons were potentially dangerous.
I suppose it's all about what you are familiar with. I have no problem heading off walking in the Australian bush, with full knowledge that there are snakes out there that could bite me if I did something stupid but you rarely see them and if you do they are flaked out on a rock asleep. I'd be very cautious about bushwalking in the US, as I've no idea of the risks.
As far as I'm aware, racoons are not dangerous (unless they have rabies). They can just be a nuisance since they're good at getting into containers to steal food.
Rule #1... Tell somebody reliable where you are going and when to expect you back and who to call if you don't come back. (Could be local police, park ranger etc depending on where you are going).
Then make sure you let them know you are back.
Far too many people get lost and nobody knows where they have gone.
1. Look up the 10 Essentials and learn what they are/how to use them.
2. Search for Wilderness First Aid (2 day) or Wilderness First Responder (10 day) courses in your area. The focus is on how to assess and treat problems after they've occurred, but in the process you'll learn what the potential dangers are and how to avoid them or notice them early. For example, you can get hypothermia at surprisingly high temperatures (50 degrees F) in the right conditions, and some of the symptoms are paradoxical.
3. This one might be a bit controversial, but look up the Boy Scouts of America requirements for tenderfoot, second class, and first class scout. Before kids can start earning badges, the Boy Scouts require them to learn a fairly rigorous and comprehensive set of skills in order to not die in the process (first aid, camping, starting a fire and camp cooking, navigation, knot tying, swimming, etc., as well as some ideological requirements that you can skip). Some of these, like what to do when you're lost, you can learn from books or YouTube videos targeted to scouts. For others, you'll at least know what you don't know and the right words to look up to find classes. For example, searching for 'map skills' might not find what you're looking for, but there may be an 'orienteering' club in your area.
Yeah I second the scout handbook. You can also volunteer with your local Troop as a leader if you want. All of the classes offered by my local REI are in the $600-$1200 per weekend range. Scouts got me outdoors 12 weekends a year for about $250 in dues annually (plus a bunch of hours fundraising).
Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the replies are outdoors clubs, of which there are hundreds in the U.S. Most have a little website and/or Facebook page. Try searching “hiking club” or “outing club” along with your general area or perhaps a major park or natural feature nearby.
There are some big ones like the Sierra Club in CA, Appalachian Mountain Club in the northeast, the Mountaineers and Mazamas in the northwest, etc. They might have classes or trips that interest you, or be able to point you to smaller clubs in your area.
Clubs are usually lower-key than classes, and they go out regularly. So you can get a lot of experience and advice for free, or a small membership fee. (And maybe make some new friends.)
There are also activity-specific organizations and clubs out there. The American Alpine Club has local chapters of climbers. American Whitewater has a network of affiliate river running clubs. Etc.
1) Just go out to a forest/whatever and eat a packed lunch.
See what you're missing. Maybe an insulated container for food/drinks? Camp-compatible cutlery? Something to sit on? Better shoes? Windproof clothes?
When you feel comfortable enough, graduate to step 2
2) Make a meal in the wild, maybe have a nap or read a book.
Get a Trangia or Primus gas cooker and some ingredients you can cook a meal with. A ready-made camping meal is just fine or you can get fancy and cook everything from scratch.
Again see if you're missing something. Maybe something to wash the dishes? If you're cooking something, you either need to carry more water or have a way of purifying an existing source. Maybe a small solar panel + powerbank for your device(s). A better backpack that can fit all the gear without weighing you down?
For napping, nothing beats a Ticket To The Moon hammock. They're light but durable and you're not laying on the ground. They do need trees though, so for deserts they're not really optimal :) The pro-models with the integrated mosquito net are amazingly simple to set up.
Again, repeat steps 1 & 2 until you feel comfortable enough to move to the next step:
3) Sleeping outdoors
This is the costliest bit. The two main routes to take are either hammock or tent. For both you need a sleeping bag. Good tents are expensive, so maybe look into borrowing or renting. For hammock camping you'll want an underquilt and a tarp on top so you don't get cold or wet.
I recommend being brave about this and doing the first night(s) on your backyard or a friend's. If there are any issues you can just abort and walk inside.
After you're comfortable and equipped for all three steps, you can start planning longer multi-day trips along popular paths.
I heavily recommend getting/renting a Garmin inReach if you're going solo or outside of cell range.
Haha yeah the struggle is real. Still, the majority of cars in the leftmost lane is usually expensive with a good suspension.
I recently floored it for hours in a Dacia Jogger, going its absolute Vmax of 175 km/h, and that was uncomfortable. The same in an Audi or BMW is hardly noticeable.
It really only goes that fast on even stretches, of which there are plenty in northern & east Germany, and you literally need minutes to get there - downhill you can go a bit faster, but that gets scary quick. As soon as there is even a slight incline it starts to slow down, thats true. And I'm talking about the LPG version with 90 PS! Thats why you want to floor it: "Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt."
Funny story: I once, long ago in the corridor stopped to help a bunch of people in a Trabant, the engine had seized and it really wasn't going to go anywhere so I offered to tow them behind my 230E, which could easily do that. They agreed happily and we hooked them up, and one of their party switched to my car to show me where to go (illegal to go off the corridor, but screw it, this had massive consequences later on but at the time I was still totally oblivious). So we're back on the highway and doing 50 or so and the guy asks 'can't you go any faster?'. I say sure, but what about the tow? 'They will have to follow ;)'. Ok, so doing a 110 or so (where you could legally go maybe 90 at the time) for an hour took us to Frankfurt a/d Oder where they lived, I dropped them off at home and the guy that drove the Trabbi came to me and said that they'd never gone that fast with it before...
Good times. Obviously, for East Germans before the wende there was a lot of misery (same in Poland, my destination) but there was also a strong camaraderie, 'us against the system'.
Lovely story! I can see how 110 is scary in a Trabi, especially so considering the state the roads were in.
> there was also a strong camaraderie, 'us against the system'
I think this is what gets lost in prosperity, and what causes some of the current spiritual misery. You simply don't need other people anymore if you have enough money, which in turn destroys community. Maybe the land of plenty is a dystopia, and we're not meant to live like this for extended periods of time.
Yes, this is very true. The same in Poland. Now it's dog-eat-dog. The difference is night and day and obviously there are many gains but also there are some remarkable losses and this is one of them.
This is such an interesting point. When people have something to lose they turn inwards with the goal of protecting what they have. There's something to be said about how people can connect when nobody has resources to guard. Maybe this is part of why kids and college students can form such easy camaraderie compared to adults.
It's not about the speed, it's about proximity with other vehicles.
On AutoBahn stretches old M3s and Mercedes E190 are capable of 150 mph and they do absolutely floor it. The only risk it's mechanical failure or tyre blowing up.
I still mantain that for those looking for kinetic adrenaline the big Cigarette powerboats are better, even though they are slower than cars you are essentially always surrounded by nothing and the feeling is more intense (even though they are slower than cars) because you are in the wind yourself and the jumping on the waves makes it seems even more kinetic.
> That is 193 KPH -- seems pretty fast to me, even for the autobahn.
German here, it's not fast for the Autobahn, per se. The issue is though talking about the speed on its own is nearly meaningless, the most important factor becomes the road and what speed it is designed for. There are plenty of stretches on the Autobahn where there is no speed limit AND you can "safely" go 250+kph. Although I personally get uneasy at speeds beyond that because it starts to feel like you're entering an event horizon where unforeseen things on the road ahead are now beyond your ability to meaningfully react to them.
That being said, there are lots of stretches on the Autobahn where the speed limit is 80-100kph, often with good reason.
One time, I was driving at night in the Sierra after a storm - roads were covered in snow. It's a drive I've made close to 100 times without incident. Going around a bend, I saw a car in the ditch on the outside of the curve. I stopped the car, put on the hazards, and went to see if there was anyone in the car.
As I was about to cross the highway a car come sliding around the bend more or less sideways. I stopped and watched it slide past. I could tell it was going to miss me by 10 feet or more, but afterward I couldn't stop thinking: What if it had been headed towards me? Could I have gotten out of the way in time? What if I'd slipped? I couldn't believe how close I might have come to dying without even thinking about it. I'll never get out of the car in a storm again, at least not without thinking very carefully about the situation first.
My other near miss experience was staying at a bread-and-breakfast farmhouse in Portugal. I had taken a shower, and was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, when I noticed the light above the mirror was crooked. It was one of those swiveling can fixtures, so I reached up to adjust it. I knew it wouldn't be hot since I'd just turned it on, so I grabbed it firmly and then asked myself why it was vibrating. And for that matter why was my whole arm vibrating? When I realized I was being shocked I was able to let go and spent 20 minutes pacing around my room making sure I wasn't dead. You really can't do worse than standing barefoot, soaking wet, on a stone floor, and grabbing a live fixture, can you?
If anyone would like to explain why that didn't kill me I'm all ears.
Couple of thoughts: Probably just leaking voltage, so not a full circuit shock, that is my first guess. Also, even wet your skin has high-ish resistance. It also may have traveled on the outside of your body to ground, path of least resistance? I have been bit by 120 and 240. When it is a full load it hekkin hurts.
Does it matter whether the light was switched on? It seems like the path of least resistance in that scenario would be the other copper wire leading out of the light socket rather than the high resistance person connecting to ground.
I've had a similar experience, where (at the age of about 10) I touched an exposed 120v AC wire on a running water pump, while standing in a muddy field, and I only got a mild vibrating feeling from it.
> Does it matter whether the light was switched on?
Depends on how it is wired. Sometimes lights are wired so that the switch comes before the fixture, sometimes after. One of several reasons you should always turn power off at the breaker when fiddling with the wiring, instead of assuming it won't be hot if the switch is off.
this is the wrong way to think about it; the current will prefer to flow through both paths, which is why you can have a 20-watt lightbulb and a 10-watt lightbulb on the same circuit
> One of several reasons you should always turn power off at the breaker when fiddling with the wiring
And once you've turned the power off, test wit with a non-contact voltage detector. A brand name one that's actually been built to UL/CE standards and is subject to actual recalls/etc is under $30. It's a straightforward, pretty much foolproof way to make sure you don't get yourself shocked.
A multimeter is, in theory, a fine alternative but in practice is not. The non-contact detector detects the presence of the fluctuating magnetic field from A/C. A multimeter measures the difference in potential between two points. If you were to, say, have 120V on from same phase on both hot and neutral in an outlet, it would read 0V. If, say, the ground were also not connected then you'd also get 0V testing either against ground. By all accounts there is no voltage in the plug. If, say, each side of the plug were on a different breaker you might think you'd killed the power while it's still live. (Yes, this is based on a true story.) The only way to avoid this is to make sure you have a known good ground to test against. Whereas a non-contact voltage detector immediately lights up like a christmas tree telling you this situation is all sorts of fucked up.
ideally the hot wire is switched, and the outside of the edison socket connects to the neutral wire, so especially if the light is switched off, you're often only in a position to get a shock from whatever is on the neutral wire, which might have been what happened in the bathroom-fixture case
commonly the neutral wire has something like 20vac rms on it for a variety of reasons
if you are ungrounded (due to rubber boots or whatever) your body is in series with your capacitance to ground, and that will commonly give you just a mild vibrating feeling or nothing at all
this 'path of least resistance' thing can be pretty misleading, because if you have two resistors in parallel, the least resistance is always the parallel resistance (i.e. current through both resistors in inverse proportion to their resistances) and not just one resistor or the other
If you're touching the live end, it doesn't matter much.
Electricity doesn't take the path of least resistance. It takes all paths. Think of it as a resistor network:
(+)---[R1]----[R2]-----(-)
\--[R3]--/
R2 and R3 are parallel. R2 is you, R3 is the "path of least resistance".
If R1 is sufficiently high, e.g. the light was off but the switch interrupted the neutral side, and you touched the neutral side (i.e. the lamp was between mains and you), then the "path of least resistance" matters: R1 and the parallel set of R2/R3 form a voltage divider, and the smaller the combined resistance of the right part is, the lower the voltage across you.
That voltage is all that matters. If R1 is small enough to be insignificant, e.g. because you're touching mains and R3 isn't a short to ground, the voltage across you will be mains voltage.
> You really can't do worse than standing barefoot, soaking wet, on a stone floor, and grabbing a live fixture, can you?
Would the wetness have actually helped? Why go through all that higher resistance human flesh when the current can go straight to ground via the electrolyte solution that's around you instead?
Only really the case if the available power is limited, so flowing around you means the voltage drops. Otherwise it'll just do both. That, and wet skin has (massively) lower resistance than dry skin. It's unlikely to work out for you.
Skin is also hydrophobic. You're unlikely to have a complete circuit with no breaks on the outside of your body, unless you're currently standing in the shower.
I'd expect blood to conduct electricity much better than house hold water, due to higher salt content. Thus once the resistance of the skin has dropped because of the water on the skin, the path of least resistance should be through the inside of the body.
I've done the whole "why is my arm vibrating thing" before, except in my case I was trying to get the end of a light fitting off, and both the hot and cold prongs were in my hand. Got a nice couple of blisters where they touched the skin.
My guess would be not enough of the main current was passing across your heart to kill you? I didn't think mains electricity was necessary powerful enough to kill people in most scenarios, just that it is powerful enough to do it in an unlucky few. I'd also imagine the floor wasn't really conducting to earth.
Probably not the full voltage, just a leak. 230V is quite an experience. 120V is a mere annoyance by comparison, even if you touch live terminals directly. Even 120V is more than vibrating, though.
I've accidentally touched live electricity (230V) several times, and from speaking to other people it's not a rare occurrence. I think you actually need to be pretty unlucky to die from an electric shock at home.
During an ill-advised electrical experiment in my youth, I discharged a big capacitor into my hand. Luckily I think the current just went into and then out of my thumb back into the circuit. Still, the resulting shock knocked me over and gave me a tangible and valuable lesson about caution around high currents!
I can confirm that 230V is plenty to give you a serious jolt -- like, throw you a couple feet backwards from the thing you shouldn't have touched. I imagine it could've killed me if the connection hadn't been so rapidly broken.
And that came from the "ground" pin of an outlet! Except that the building (in a third-world country that I'll leave unnamed here) hadn't been wired correctly, as I learned the hard way.
> I think you actually need to be pretty unlucky to die from an electric shock at home.
Though if there's one thing we've learned from the article, there will be plenty of people waiting in the wings of the Intenet to sputter "Karma!" and "Darwin!" when you do.
Aside, if you ever feel like saying that sort of thing, take an idea, principal, or religious icon that has a deep meaning to you, or in the latter case, someone whose work you think was influential and great. Fix that image in your mind, think "serves you right, asshole", and scream the word or the name out at the top of your lungs. Then reflect on how fucking stupid that was.
> Aside, if you ever feel like saying that sort of thing, take an idea, principal, or religious icon that has a deep meaning to you, or in the latter case, someone whose work you think was influential and great. Fix that image in your mind, think "serves you right, asshole", and scream the word or the name out at the top of your lungs. Then reflect on how fucking stupid that was.
Uh...
That's fucking stupid because I presumably picked an idea or person that's completely unrelated to the concept of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". Also because I'm at the top of my lungs. If I called out something like "Midgley'd!" it wouldn't share those reasons for being fucking stupid at all.
Depends - if the path it takes is through your heart (or head) you're probably going to have a bad time. eg touching live with one hand and neutral with the other.
I've had a few mains shocks before as well, a fair few years ago, and what saved me was live and neutral touched the same hand. I now have an inductance tester I use first, then follow up with multimeter and only THEN do I start whatever I'm doing.
i think to kill you either there needs to be enough power to burn organs, which still may only affect one limb and not be fatal, or to pass through your heart, say from one arm to another, or arm to opposite leg, and for your heart to be disrupted rather than just shocked. But the two aspects are the amount of power and the path the current takes. Maybe the floor tile was above a waterproof membrane, like a wet-room, and so inhibited the power current flow?
Nearly the same thing happened to me. Except instead of the car missing me my brain told me perhaps from tornado safety training in school? If I dropped into the narrow V shaped drainage ditch so the car would pass over me I would live. It did and I did. I can still remember the tire passing inches over my face in slow motion as the car flew into the trees.
I was fine. The driver was some kid that stole their parents car. The kid seemed uninjured. The parents were I guess chasing them in another car as they arrived only a few seconds after the wreck.
I guess you are mocking my near death experience? You must be a wonderful person.
Allow me to even further your disbelief. Nearly the same thing happened to me again years later. Except the second time was a motorcycle. I narrowly sidestepped a motorcycle on a mountain road that had taken the turn too fast while I was looking over a marked "scenic viewpoint". The driver in this case though I do not know if they lived. As they did go over the side of the ravine into very rough rocks and ground. They were alive when Ambulance took them away though.
Although I think you're right that they're mocking the OP, something similar saved my friend from serious injury/death.
He saw a car barreling towards him as he was walking on the street, instinctually jumped up, rolled over the windshield and roof and landed safely, albeit not on his feet.
> Going around a bend, I saw a car in the ditch on the outside of the curve. I stopped the car, put on the hazards, and went to see if there was anyone in the car. As I was about to cross the highway a car come sliding around the bend more or less sideways.
The lesson here is this: lightning strikes twice (frustratingly, the usual idiom is as wrong as can be). In other words, if you observe an outcome and have no other data whatsoever about the conditions that produced that outcome, it is safe to assume that the conditions continue to exist to allow the outcome to happen again.
In this case, the existence of a car that has spun out around a curve is the clue that cars will continue to spin out along that curve.
They teach Motorsport marshals in the UK to always keep the car that has come off-track between yourself and live traffic, and never turn your back to the track.
Whatever caused the accident is just as likely to cause another car to go in, ie oil or coolant on track, or even debris from the current incident.
Same applies on the roads I guess, especially in poor conditions.
I was military police in Germany for a few months and the one useful thing I learned there is that when you help another car to always protect yourself with their car or your own. So always park behind the stopped car and avoid being in direct line of traffic.
Also, in confrontations where you are outnumbered, keep one of the suspects between you and the rest. Discourages anybody taking a shot at you when their friend/accomplice is in the line of fire.
This is fairly standard martial arts strategy when fighting multiple attackers as well. If you're fighting two people and keep one of them between you and the other, then it's just a one-on-one fight.
If you watch martial arts movies you should know that the attackers wait in line and only attack once the previous one has gotten a beating :). They never attack at the same time.
People with good tactical awareness make sure they never face more then one opponent at the same time. They survive to tell the tale. Down the line mediocre movie makers recreate the situation in a contrived way. Rinse repeat. Eventually the whole thing is a simulacrum. You're expecting a classic kung-fu movie battle, and that's what you get.
No, its “the occurrence of a rare event is an indication of the existence of the conditions in which that event occurs in that time and place, so if you have evidence that such an event has recently occurred, you should treat the place where it did as a place where that kind of event has an elevated likelihood of occurring”, which is far more specific and actionable than “better safe than sorry”.
I think the idea for the metaphor is that, if you see lightning hit a tree, you shouldn't think it is so rare that it wouldn't hit the tree a second time (as some people then think "lightning never strikes the same place twice")... it is, in fact, so rare to have hit anything at all, that it having hit that tree in the first place is maybe an indication that that tree is acting as some kind of preferential local lightning rod and it is actually likely to hit the same tree again.
> Believe it or not, this long-held myth is far from the truth. While the odds of being struck by lightning are low, the chances of lightning striking the same place twice are high. Lightning can, and often will, hit the same spot multiple times.
Makes sense. I was stuck with the idea that "seeing a car on the side of the road" is closer to seeing a tree that had been struck. Actually seeing it get struck would be like seeing the car actively crash.
Close in thought to each other, but still different things. Granted, I think your point still fully holds. There is a decay function for the likelihood of repeating events. And if you don't have evidence that what you are looking at is old, much safer to assume it is not and that the circumstances are still primed for it to happen again.
Repeating and periodic are not the same. Seeing a singed tree or a spun out car tells you nothing about how frequent these events are. They do tell you this place is likely to see those events, at any rate.
It's not the time, it's the unknown/unseen factor that's making it likely or unlikely. You think you are seeing lighting striking a tree. But maybe what you are actually seeing is lighting striking a lighting rod.
Lightning will not strike a TREE again because usually it destroys the tree in some way, changing it's height. But for many other things (buildings, mountains, etc), lightning will happily strike it over and over again.
Is the car in a ditch for a truly unlikely reason, or there a hidden lightning rod there? Perhaps you shouldn't assume a seemingly unlikely event won't happen again.
One very easy application of this axiom is whenever you're near water or rain and don't want to get wet. You're at the beach, climbing on rocks and you're not sure if a wave will hit you if you climb on the next rock. Is the rock wet? If so it will, if it's dry, you're fine. You're next to a sprinkler system and it's going around and you don't know if you'll get hit if you stand here, is the floor wet? And so on.
Definitely take this into account when driving too! Don’t just rubberneck at the victims. Check surroundings to see what could’ve caused it.
I was out on pescadero creek road and saw a guy had wrapped his 911 turbo around a tree. This particular bend would send you off a hillside if not for the trees. I slowed not just to gawk at the loss of a great car or to have sympathy for a man who just lost a valuable asset but cause I was wondering, “how did he manage that? Is something wrong with the road?” Didn’t notice anything wrong with the road but I took it slow anyway.
He probably just took the corner too hot. Waved a happy wave to him as I finished the turn slowly then revved back up to the usual fun speeds to enjoy the remaining 150 bends.
Typically when a fixture like that is connected to a live line it is pretty well grounded. In this case it sounds like the grounding wasn't perfect and pretty much turned you and the mirror into a voltage divider. Your saving grace was the fact that you were the bigger resistor. If the mirror wasn't mostly grounding out the circuit, the wet skin would have provided nil resistance and you would have probably at least been burned if not killed.
Pro tip: Always touch electrical-y things with the back of your hands first; like with a strange animal. Any spasms will cause you to contact away from the thingy.
It only takes 80ma across your heart to stop it. Mains voltage, in both the US and the rest of the world, can easily develop that kind of current, especially if there is moisture involved. And yet plenty of folks have accidental contact without lasting effects. Electricity is fickle that way. The difference between, no problem and totally dead can be subtle, random and not obvious. It all depends on the path the current takes. Show it respect.
In a lab, sure. In reality you need a lot of amps going into the body to get enough amps across the heart to screw with it. Defibrillators wouldn't be chock full of capacitors if that wasn't the case.
Constantly repeating these sorts of misleading DARE-esque talking points is why nobody takes what the safety preachers have to say seriously.
People find out through life experience that smoking while filling gas, a couple amps from arm to arm, working under suspended loads, side rolling big cylinders long distances, using ladders on less than perfect surfaces and other little stuff like that isn't the instant death and dismemberment that they were told it was supposed to be and that throws doubt at everything else.
You can't lie to people 50% of the time even if it's "for their own good" and expect them to believe the other 50% of stuff you say. Electricity and many other things are sufficiently dangerous that you shouldn't need to lie.
There's a pretty big difference in the odds of a house mains electrical shock stopping your heart compared to the 1 in 6 chance of the bullet being in the chamber that lands in alignment with the barrel.
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities and expected outcomes in probabilistic scenarios, especially in when one possible outcome is catastrophic with low probability. Otherwise you wouldn't see so many reckless distracted drivers on the road.
You are advocating for a public communication strategy that only makes sense in some kind of rationalist fantasy world, but not in the real world.
It's not some conspiracy to infantilize the public, it's just good sense to not do dangerous stuff and tempt fate.
Yes, pretty much. 400 people are electrocuted in the US every year, usually in industrial situations. Thousands of people will get shocked today. The odds of a heart problem are low enough that suggesting people should be terrified of light sockets because it may stop their heart is just fearmongering, and reduces the effectiveness of other safety-related communication. This is like California proudly proclaiming that everything causes cancer. Counterproductive.
I appreciate the point you’re making, but I’d like a source for
> Thousands of people will get shocked today
Before I come to any conclusions.
According to [0], “There are also at least 30,000 shock incidents per year that are non-fatal” and “ In the United States, there are approximately 1000 deaths per year, as a result of electrical injuries”
So about 1 in 30(ish) if we assume they accounted for nonreporting. If we assume they underreported by 10x, 1/300 is still pretty bad odds
It's also fallacious to look at numbers like "1000 / 30000 = 3%" and say that you shouldn't have to worry about getting electrocuted when handling electricity because it's only a 3% chance of dying if you get electrocuted.
That 3% number is causally intertwined with the fact that professionals take safety very seriously, and most non-professionals are afraid of electrical stuff and generally do try to take precautions around it, within the limits of their own knowledge.
That's 30,000 people getting shocked and it being serious, needing to go to the hospital. People doing work around houses get shocked all the time. 120v in typical US house is like mildly annoying. Definitely not trying to hold onto wires with bare hands or anything but getting "bit" while changing light switches or outlets isn't painful enough for many people to worry about finding the breaker box.
I read it more like saying that we should teach "Russian roulette has a 1/6 chance to kill you, which increases every round", rather than "Russian roulette will definitely kill you."
The former puts the information into the hands of individuals, and let's them draw the appropriate conclusions. With the latter, you risk someone saying "I played Russian roulette and it was fine, this whole safety thing is BS”
This risk is even bigger if millions of people have tried and survived the purportedly deadly activity, such as home wiring shocks.
Exactly why I believe telling the public anything but the whole truth in a pandemic is a terrible idea (not that I really wish to open that can of worms).
Defibrillators are full of capacitors to boost the voltage, not current. They also use carefully located electrodes, and come with a razor to remove body hair to create the ideal conditions to affect the heart because they need to work every time. That has nothing to do with whether residential power is dangerous or not.
I said mains voltage won't kill you every time but it definitely can. We wouldn't put it in residential settings if it was instant death. The problem is that the conditions that can lead to a deadly accident don't trigger any of our ape-brain fear response. Like any risk it should be approached with knowledge and care.
If you think any of the things you listed are fine and safe just because they don't result in "instant death" then I would say we have very different ideas about risk management.
I don't appreciate you calling me a liar for presenting facts and urging caution.
Portraying the 80ma number as anything other than what can happen in a freak accident is misleading and dishonest and is counterproductive if the goal is to get people to respect electricity because it is in contradiction to the lived experience of basically everybody.
>The problem is that the conditions that can lead to a deadly accident don't trigger any of our ape-brain fear response.
No. The problem here is that you are peddling fear to get the reaction you want out of people. Potential energy, electric or otherwise is potentially dangerous. Pretending like it's more dangerous than it is to scare people straight is bad. Just because reality doesn't scare people into behaving how you like doesn't entitle you to be dishonest.
>If you think any of the things you listed are fine and safe just because they don't result in "instant death" then I would say we have very different ideas about risk management.
If you think it's ok to just lie to people because you think the end goal is noble I don't care what your ideas are.
Volts and amps are not independent values if you're applying them to the same resistance (you), and you cannot "boost voltage" using capacitors. A capacitor can only charge to the voltage that it is charged with.
Yes, a single capacitor will only hold the voltage applied to it. But after charging each one and cleverly arranging them in series you can hold very high voltages with a bank of them. This is what occurs in a voltage multiplier circuit.
Hmm, I didn't experiment much with that, but most houses are wired with 30 mA differential circuit breakers. If there is a difference of more than 30 mA between phase and neutral, it means there is a leak to ground somewhere, so the breaker trips. Well below 80 mA (though not instantly).
If you're wet though, your impedance is lower, so a lot more current can flow through you. That makes it much more dangerous to touch electrical stuff. Same with being barefoot.
Our bodies also have capacitance (complex impedance), which makes us more sensitive to AC than DC.
What I don't get is why do we still use differential circuit breakers while connecting neutral with ground instead of monitoring line impedance a thousand times a second. You'd trip the circuit breaker when connecting (including touching) neutral or phase to ground, without endangering the user (currently we only detect a user touching phase via the current flowing through them).
Have the circuit self-test multiple times a second, and use 10kV (like livestock fences) with very low capacity to measure impedance: give a serious jolt to the person touching a wire, with no danger.
This is a really silly take. Parent post didn't say YOU WILL DIE IF YOU EVER GET SHOCKED, FULL STOP.
They said that you can die if you're shocked. If you have a substantial chance of death doing something it's common sense to avoid that thing, especially when it's trivial to do so. If you want to be a manly man who don't need no safety, go for it, but you're setting up a straw man in OP's post and safety awareness in general that isn't there.
> Defibrillators wouldn't be chock full of capacitors if that wasn't the case
Disrupting the heart's rhythm is way easier than restoring it. Especially if the disrupting current got in through punctured skin (which the defibrillator is not allowed to do)
> a couple amps from arm to arm
This is very bad advice. A couple amps at 220VAC is devastating if actually delivered inside your body. The reason people routinely survive mains shocks is the current doesn't actually get through due to intact dry skin, pure (poorly conducting) water, no path across their body, or no path to ground, which is all a matter of luck.
> Disrupting the heart's rhythm is way easier than restoring it. Especially if the disrupting current got in through punctured skin (which the defibrillator is not allowed to do)
But that's what a defib does. It disrupts your heart's rhythm. And then you hope it goes back to normal.
<INSERT DUMB THING> can potentially kill you so always take precautions is about the size of the message that fits in people's brains and everyday decision making process thus it is the reasonably actionable thing to communicate.
If you through further education come to possess a more nuanced view of risk analysis this doesn't invalidate the simpler process it just adds value to your understanding. For instance YOU don't seem to have concluded that there is zero risk through your more nuanced understanding. Why are you assuming everyone is is dumber?
> It only takes 80ma across your heart to stop it. Mains voltage, in both the US and the rest of the world, can easily develop that kind of current, especially if there is moisture involved. And yet plenty of folks have accidental contact without lasting effects.
I think that’s because most accidental contact doesn’t produce much current across your heart. Touching the two wires of mains electricity with one hand? Not a good idea, but unlikely to kill you. Touching one with your left and one with your right hand? Way more risky. Grabbing one with your left and one with your right hand? Even more risky.
And of course, modern circuitry often has circuit breakers that in many cases rapidly stop the current from flowing.
“To reduce the risk of electrocution, RCDs should operate within 25–40 milliseconds with any leakage currents[clarification needed] (through a person) of greater than 30 mA, before electric shock can drive the heart into ventricular fibrillation, the most common cause of death through electric shock. By contrast, conventional circuit breakers or fuses only break the circuit when the total current is excessive (which may be thousands of times the leakage current an RCD responds to). A small leakage current, such as through a person, can be a very serious fault, but would probably not increase the total current enough for a fuse or overload circuit breaker to isolate the circuit, and not fast enough to save a life.”
I worked the lowest paying job in a ski lodge one winter. One day while waiting in the cafeteria line, one hand on the stainless steel counter, I noticed that I got a bit of a shock from the steel railing on the other side.
There was also a stainless fryer on the counter, but insulated with plastic legs, so I did some experimenting by completing the circuit a few ways:
- Counter to rail: weak shock
- Counter to fryer: stronger shock
- Fryer to rail: nothing
I reasoned that the rail and fryer were both grounded, the fryer more so because the metal exterior was wired directly to the ground pin in a 3-prong electrical plug. The problem was the counter.
I was pretty stoked: as a lowly ski lodge porter / custodian I'd diagnosed an electrical fault in the cafeteria! Everyone working there was way above my pay grade, but I got the manager's attention and excitedly explained my three experiments. The manager looked annoyed, confirmed that touching the counter and fryer gave a shock, and then unplugged the fryer (thus removing the ground) and went on with the day. As far as I know the counter remained electrified for the rest of the season, or longer.
Doesn't sound very likely. Static can come back, but it's not usually going to be constant enough to experiment with unless you're doing something to make it come back or there's a generator for it.
Usually it's good for one little light zap and then nothing for minutes/hours.
Last Saturday afternoon I was driving home in heavy fog. Suddenly coming towards me was a BMW SUV at least 75% in my lane. I managed to brake heavily and drift towards the outside verge. We didn’t hit.
It’s about the closest I’ve come to a head on collision. With my whole family in the car, there was utter silence for the next several minutes.
From one survivor of a near-certain-death scenario to another: glad that you’re still here with us to tell your story. No two experiences are alike, but don’t be surprised if it takes you a long while to process what happened. Good that you’re able to talk about it here; if you can, I encourage you to talk to your family about it, even if only to let them know you acknowledge it happened.
(Then again, feel free to ignore the unsolicited advice of an internet stranger, but if you say you nearly died, then you’re likely in shock to a degree. Maybe this sounds excessive, but consider professional support.)
Comment appreciated. My wife, in the front seat next to me, and I were certainly in shock. We pulled over and had a 15 minutes rest while the adrenaline wore off. We breathed deeply and talked about what had just happened.
I used to commute in London for many years on a motorcyle and also raced them for a few years. I've had my share of near misses and ended up in hospital once. That was all somehow different - it was only me in danger usually and at least when racing I was always hyper aware that things can go bad fast.
This was a totally different experience. Completely innocuous one might think, on a road regularly traveled, at legal speeds. I think having my family with me made a big difference to my reaction. It wasn't just me in danger any more.
Glad to be of even the smallest help. I think you have the right head on for dealing with this. Just keep open the door to communication with all the others, especially since the shock will fade differently for each of you.
All I can say is that it took me a long time to regain the appetite for calculated risk. My companion in the scenario seemingly shrugged it right off, but only through keeping talking did I know otherwise.
In case you had hit, a deadly accident would be more likely because of the SUV's
weigh. A 4000 pounds vehicle contains has twice the energy of a 2000 pounds
vehicle at the same speed. Just another example of inequality in face of death
between rich and poor.
The solution, obviously*, is to just drive faster if you're in a light vehicle, to match the SUV's kinetic energy. If they're going 40 MPH, you just need to go ~60MPH, thanks to the v^2 in the kinetic energy equation.
An arms race of sorts is inevitable. Your reactive armour will be worthless in the face of my active measures. Innocent casualties are inevitable, but they're the price we pay for freedom.
It just shows that life is a long sequence of being lucky. It bet during the course of a week everybody does something that may get them killed if unlucky. Most people are lucky but a few aren’t.
I can relate to the shock story. In a school lab I managed to lean on a exposed 220V cable. I remember my arm shaking and hearing a low hum but couldn’t figure out what’s going on. It felt like an eternity until I pulled my arm away but I bet in reality it was just a second.
> It just shows that life is a long sequence of being lucky. It bet during the course of a week everybody does something that may get them killed if unlucky. Most people are lucky but a few aren’t.
That kind of thinking makes people resist taking reasonable safety precautions. The reality is that risk varies a lot; while there's no such thing as perfectly safe, there are things you can do that substantially reduce your risk of dying young, such as driving less.
surely the light was dissipating more power, yes, but this was offered as a potential explanation for the fact that the person getting shocked only got a mild shock, a fact to which it has no causal connection whatsoever
The 15A limit in the circuit breaker is there to protect the wires, not you. 15A at 110V passing through your body will cause massive damage and literally cook you after stopping your heart if it's in the way.
Modern circuit breakers and outlets have GFCI/AFCI electronics that detect abnormal current leaks to ground and abnormal waveforms, and shut off the circuit. These actually stand a chance of saving you in a scenario like this.
The wiring is meaningless. 1 amps is more than enough to kill you. Even if enough current flew to melt the cable you'd be dead well before the cable caught fire if it's flowing through you.
A breaker may provide some protection against electric shock (assuming it's an RCD or RCBO), but I wouldn't like to rely on it.
Portugal is 230V. Not sure what breaker the lighting would be on but in the UK it's not uncommon for a 6A lighting circuit to not be on an RCD at all.
I don't think the breaker is really relevant here. Unless you've been impaled by a spike, it's impossible to draw 15A of current through your body from a 120V or 240V circuit. At those voltages, there's really no difference (to you) between shocks from circuits with or without a 15A breaker.
I guess there is a asterisk here if you're also shorting something much more conductive than yourself, since the breaker might cut power before you'd naturally let go and break yourself from the circuit. But that seems like a pretty unlikely situation for most home shocks.
After wondering for 20 years why people got shocked when electric safety is common knowledge, I got shocked myself twice in one year because I was stupid
I once worked maintenance at a department store, and one of my main responsibilities was electrical repairs (despite lack of formal training). The lighting circuits were all commercial 277 volts. A fluorescent light appeared to be burned out, but as I was changing it, I learned that it was actually a wiring issue when I was installing the new tube atop a 12 foot ladder. My knuckle grazed the fixture and I lit up like a Christmas tree. The resulting reflex caused me to crush the fluorescent tube, but somehow I managed to not fall. Oh, hello death, I acknowledge the brush.
PSA about driving around bends. If you're ever in this situation, don't stop your car anywhere near the bend! If the bend is caused by nature, that usually means that it's wrapping around a hill or trees, which means it's blind in at least one direction. Human drivers are not physiologically capable of stopping a car in time to avoid an obstacle on a blind curve.
I've lived near two such blind curves in my life, and at each I've seen minor issues like a flat tire turn into catastrophic accidents when the driver parks and someone else comes along and hits them.
Kind of related, but if someone is being shocked, live, what is the safest way to help them?
The immediate answer might be turn of the circuit breaker, but what if we're in a giant office building? Or I don't have access or know where the circuit breaker is?
IMHO that's a rare event, usually instead of being continuously shocked, someone gets shocked and then in the worst case they die and you have to apply CPR until an ambulance can try to save them.
If someone is being shocked, live, then it all depends on the circumstances, but the most generic standard suggestion in various first aid courses seems to be using a non-conductive stick (e.g. broomhandle) to push them away from the source of power or vice versa. They have probably grabbed the thing with their hand and are unable to release it as the hand is cramped, so that may be difficult.
Finding a circuit breaker may be too long. My intuitive guess (though that's not something I have seen recommended) is that intentionally causing a short-circit and trip the breaker might be faster.
Kick them away (or sideways, basically anything to break their grip on the electrified thing they're locked onto) from whatever they're holding. Your shoes aren't conductive so you will be safe.
Alternatively, throw a scarf or other garment as a loop in between the victim and the source of the shock and use it to pull them away from it from behind them - the garment not being conductive means you'll be safe.
Oh, I had that "why is my arm vibrating" more often than I should. But not often enough for my brain to reduce time to diagnosis, which surprises me every time.
Me too. A light socket was apparently powered via two separate circuits. I turned off one but not the other. Idk what was happening because I touched a live wire with my hand while my elbow brushed a metal door jamb so I think the juice flowed through my forearm and not the rest of my body. Made my arm buzz, but didn't really hurt and I was able to let go. New rule is just turn off every circuit in the house every time.
Just in case you're not aware of them, there are screwdrivers with voltage detectors[1] that you can (should?) use to check that there's no power on the thing you're working on.
> If anyone would like to explain why that didn't kill me I'm all ears.
What kills people is current, not voltage. With AC having your heart beat 50 times a second can also cause you to die hours or even days after receiving a shock, but even that requires enough current to flow and cross your skin resistance. Go to ghe hospital even if you are alive and feel well after an electrical shock! Your heart may have suffered from this.
That being said, there can be many things at play here. E.g. there could have been contact resistance between the live wire and the fixture, which would mean the current that could have flown through your body was limited by that resistance. The reason why you can touch an insulated wire is because there are megaohms of resistance between your hand and the wire. Lower that resistance gradually and there will be a point where you feel the electricity slightly, lower ot more and there is the shock. The most hurtful thing would piercing a wire through the skin, because then the skin resistance is gone.
Aside from contact resistance it could also be that the bath the current took through your body was good (so more on the surface, not across the heart, but down one side of the body and so on).
That being said, your description of the shock does not sound like a fully fledged 230V 50Hz shock to me (certified electical engineer). In my experience you will definitely notice it right away, e.g. because you suddenly just see black and a sharp pain including with extreme vibrations that feel like pure energy is hitting you with a brick in the face. Feeling the vibration like you described it and then making the decision to let go sounds like only a very small current was flowing.
I'd hazard a guess that the person is using 120vac 60Hz instead of 230/50. 120vac is not as dangerous as 230 w.r.t. this kind of accident. I agree that they seem to have only held the fixture with one arm and probably standing on the leg with the arm outstretched or at least biasing weight to that leg to help reach. the current likely didn't go deep and didn't go across the heart. i agree that there wasn't a hard connection but must have had a path through the fixture that wasn't pure... likely a wire rubbed off the coating a bit but not quite fully so there was not a good connection to shock him with much current.
Since we're speculating, it may have been a halogen light fixture, which means there would have been a step-down transformer between the power switch and the light bulb. Depending on the specific type, it could have been as low as 12V/50Hz.
> With AC having your heart beat 50 times a second can also cause you to die hours or even days after receiving a shock
Can you point to any source for this? I have not been able to find any report of someone suddenly dying from cardiac problems days after an electric shock. It sounds kinda plausible, but I wonder if it is an urban legend.
People lose limbs or die from severe electric burns, and people can die from cardiac arrest immediately after being shocked, but are there really cases where people have cardiac arrest days after an electric shock?
I've read a lot of assertions that this is true, but I'm looking for reports of this actually occurring. Either case studies from medical journals, or even newspaper articles.
50 times a second is hyperbole. Your heart cannot beat that fast because there is a refractory period between one contraction and the next. Before that could actually take place your heart would go into ventricular fibrillation, a disorganized electrical depolarization of heart muscle where many small electrical impulses cause chaotic and ineffective contractions of correspondingly tiny and disparate parts of the heart muscle.
I've heard this idea before, that you can die hours or days after an electric shock without realizing anything is wrong, but I think it is very rare.
An electrical injury can certainly trigger an abnormal heart rhythm, but you would probably notice most of those and, hopefully, go get a cardiogram.
If you felt normal, but had a serious electrical injury to the heart that would later lead to fibrillation, one would have to postulate some sort of abnormal re-entrant (sort-of circular) depolarization current in the heart muscle that was very regular, say 60 beats per minute, but that was prone to deteriorate into fibrillation over time.
That is what I recall about the matter, off the top of my head.
Don't take it lierally, your heart is not beating that fast of course, it just gets a trigger to do so at 50Hz. This is what we learned when going through the German TREI training which includes learning about all product and safety norms.
Your heart is triggered by weak electrical impulses and what we learned is that these impulses are surprisingly resistant against outside interference, but there is a threshold at which this is not the case anymore. It certainly won't beat 50 times a second (or 60 times for the 60 Hz people), but it will get a signal to do so 50 times a second.
What we learned further was that electrical incidents have high variability, some people can die by just touching the wrong wire, some survive lightning strikes twice. A true gamble.
I cannot point you at more resources here, all my resources we had are A) German and B) fall under stupid copy right regulations which I think are a crime when we are talking about any kind of norm. "Hey these are the rules you have to adhere to! Just keep in mind to pay us a few grand a year to get the up to date version"
Way back when I was a student living in an old rented house in London, I went into the bathroom to find the bulb had blown. It was a pull cord switch, so I didn't know if it was on or off, but knew I wouldn't be so stupid as to stick my fingers in the bulb holder while changing the bulb, so no big deal if it was still live. Standing barefoot on the enamelled metal bath, I bent the cable so I could see how to screw the bulb in, and the ancient insulation on the cable split. I came to, lying in the bath with a huge bump on the back of my head. I knew exactly which path the current had taken because it hurt all down the right side of my body, but fortunately it mostly went down that side, not across my chest. So much for British bathrooms having pull-cord switches so you can't electrocute yourself.
As a Kiwi moved to the UK I think pull cords only exist because much fo the housing here was all built in the 60s-70s and hasn't been updated since.
In NZ I'd never seen a pull cord until I moved to the UK. All of our electrics in bathrooms are certified for use around water there, including proper breakers/multiple RCDs etc.
I think modernised UK homes that are now up to date often forgo the pull cords.
From an engineer here, let's not continue this dangerous trope.
High voltage breaks down resistance and allows current to flow. Current can only flow in the presence of voltage.
Proof:
A 1V 1000A power supply won't kill any one and won't give a shock. A 2000V .001A power supply might give quite a shock on the other hand, and depending upon any capacitance in the supply might just as well prove fatal.
>A 1V 1000A power supply won't kill any one and won't give a shock.
It very well could if the frequency is high enough. The skin is like a capacitor which acts like a short circuit at high frequency. DC is much less dangerous than AC at the same current/voltage for this reason.
> A 2000V .001A power supply might give quite a shock on the other hand, and depending upon any capacitance in the supply might just as well prove fatal.
What does the capacitor supply, that the PSU can't? Could it be discharge current?
Before you accuse me of repeating dangerous tropes, please consider making sure to discuss it with the folks at VDE, because this is what it says in their (and the equivalent european) product norms and norms for electrical installations.
When touching the positive pole of a 1V 1000A PSU (I assume DC) you won't have 1000A flowing through your body. It is not the rating current of the PSU that kills you, but the actual current going through your body. And how well that current will flow through your body depends on many things, including voltage, frequency (if we are talking AC), contact resistances, skin resistance, the internal resistance of your body, how big you are, your ground connection resistance, the duration of the current flow, etc.
There is a reason we use high AC voltage for transportation of currents for long distances.
I do see where the general objection to the "current kills" comes from, even if their reasoning got a bit muddled.
All else equal, twice the voltage yields twice the current (and 4x the power).
So while yes, it's the current that kills you, in the majority of circumstances high voltage = high current. Outside of explicitly current-limited setups (e.g. a Van de Graaff generator or a desktop ionizer), most higher voltage devices will kill you more easily.
And so the "voltage doesn't kill" meme more often than not (IMO) gives laymen an undue sense of safety when working with higher voltages, at the benefit of appealing to the more electrically-inclined crowds sense of "being precisely correct".
Just look at the dozens deaths a year from people messing with microwave transformers, trying to make some pretty wood lightning art, for an example of this.
> in the majority of circumstances high voltage = high current
To be debated. Most of the visible (air-arcing) shocks I tend to get happen when I wear the wrong textile and given the length of the arc the voltage is well above 1 kV. So in most of the circumstances I personally encounter the current did not kill me.
What kills you is the current flow through your body. Voltage and frequency helps to produce that flow. RCDs and other protective devices help to limit that flow.
High voltage is dangerous if it has the current to back it. High voltage is also dangerous in the hands of people who don't understand the difference between current and voltage.
It's as simple as that. A high enough voltage will find a current path ionizing the air or whatever is in it's way. A high current doesn't doesn't do that by itself.
Your use of the pedantic trope is trying to win the argument, but destroys the causal effect of why people die which is high voltage. It's like saying "No, he didn't die because he jumped off the building. He died because his body hit the ground." Pedantic, sure, but completely ignores the cause of death.
That's why you see warning signs for "HIGH VOLTAGE" but not "HIGH CURRENT".
It's AC and the cycle (Hz) is x, then the voltage hits +/- max at 2x and also crosses 0 at 2x. Current in the system also crosses 0 at 2x although the phase angle is likely to differ from the applied voltage.
One thing I learned from reading some stuff on an electician forum years ago is that the actual ground is really not that attractive to household electricity, mostly just to lightning. I recall them mentioning a video of, IIRC, someone connecting a 15A circuit to a metal stake driven several feet into the ground without the circuit breaking. This is also why things like stray voltage shocking cows can happen. I'm guessing that this might potentially be part of why electric shocks aren't deadly more often, it may not be just a path to ground needed but a path through ground and back into the circuit (although the current needed to kill you is much less than tripping a breaker and I think there are various situations that can make it easy for that amount to flow into the ground even if there isn't a good path back to the circuit, which sometimes there is, so possibly this isn't really a factor).
> the actual ground is really not that attractive to household electricity, mostly just to lightning
I assume that's because it doesn't form a complete circuit with the electrical substation your power is coming from -- though some power is delivered, perhaps does due to capacitance between the ground and the distribution lines.
Note it would be completely different if your power service used single-wire earth return (SWER)[0].
The circuit is not back to the substation, but rather your local transformer. There is likely a grounding rod at the pole the transformer is on, and one grounding rod at each of the premises served by the transformer. It's just that resistance of the earth, especially dry earth, is quite high compared to wires.
I touched something with a live current in it once as a child. I was like "huh, that feels kinda weird" and then let go after a second. Only later did I realize how lucky I was that it wasn't lethal! It was in a 220v country even (not that I understand how much that actually affects the chances of causing harm, but still).
Most things that are incredibly dangerous won't kill you individually. Something incredibly dangerous might kill 10%---one in ten.
Years ago, I heard of someone feeding their pets cooked, bone-in chicken. Eating cooked chicken bones is very dangerous, but you can do it for years before that one day that it suddenly isn't safe.
A long time ago someone who did home inspections taught me that if you need to check if something can electrocute you to always use the back of your hand. If it is live, your arm will move away. To this day I always test with the back of my hand before changing a bulb.
> My other near miss experience was staying at a bread-and-breakfast farmhouse in Portugal. I had taken a shower, and was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, when I noticed the light above the mirror was crooked. It was one of those swiveling can fixtures, so I reached up to adjust it. I knew it wouldn't be hot since I'd just turned it on, so I grabbed it firmly and then asked myself why it was vibrating. And for that matter why was my whole arm vibrating? When I realized I was being shocked I was able to let go and spent 20 minutes pacing around my room making sure I wasn't dead. You really can't do worse than standing barefoot, soaking wet, on a stone floor, and grabbing a live fixture, can you?
> If anyone would like to explain why that didn't kill me I'm all ears.
I once got jolted while grabbing an electric transformer. I've researched this a bit, but I'm not a doctor so take my hypothesizing here with a grain of salt:
From what I've read, it seems like most deaths are caused by 1) disruption of the human body's electrical systems or 2) severe burns where electricity enters/exits the body.
It's a bit unclear to me what exactly causes burns--it seems that arcs, especially longer, sustained arcs, are related, but not necessarily. This seems to happen more with high-current situations. If you didn't experience burns, it's probably because the current wasn't high enough to cause that.
The more common thing seems to be disruption of the body's electrical systems, which can occur with much weaker currents than cause burns. The most common thing seems to be that electricity across the heart can disrupt the nerves that regulate heartbeat, but electricity across blood vessels can also cause constriction that causes stroke, and electricity across the brain can cause seizures, disruption of breathing/pulse, etc. It really does seem like the vast majority of deaths are caused by electricity across the heart though. If you don't see cardiac symptoms shortly after a shock, you're unlikely to see them, which is probably because the electricity didn't primarily go across your heart.
I'm not sure what the configuration of your grabbing this light fixture was, but a right-handed person grabbing a light fixture with their right hand, would likely see a current traveling through their right arm and then down through their right leg and, to a lesser extent, through their left leg, to the floor (once the current hits your torso there's more "bandwidth" on the way to the floor and the current spreads out more which is why you experienced "vibrating" in your hand and arm, but not your torso). This path doesn't take the current over your heart or any of the parts of the brain that regulate heartbeat or breathing, so that's my best guess as to why you didn't die.
There are several mountains in North America, Central America, South America, Spain, the Philippines, and probably other countries w/ Spanish language influence named "the Sierra <something>s" or "the <something> Sierras".
There was recently a foot found in a pond. Lake was acidic and hot. Someone jumped in.
Please don't fuck with nature for fun. It's all great memories, but one of 100 of you will die and someone else has to find your body and clean up your mess.
Risk can be fun. I don't feel bad if someone gets hurt or killed doing an activity that is inherently dangerous. They died doing what they enjoyed and feeling alive. Don't feel bad for me if I go that way either.
I think it's basically an "informed consent" thing. If people are clearly informed and consciously aware of the risk, that's completely up to them (eg. free solo climbers).
Where it gets tricky, in my opinion is:
- we aren't convinced the person is currently capable of making rational decisions
- we aren't convinced the person is fully informed and equipped with an intimate understanding of the risk they're undertaking
I think both of these cases are about wanting what's best for the individual, but struggling with the balance of support vs. control.
No, but you can know that A people out of 100,000 have died doing B making it less dangerous than C, more dangerous than D and 100x as dangerous as E and so on.
That might actually false confidence. For example, some activities might be comprised of more skilled people driving down the fatality rate. But another activity might have fewer or more manageable risks for unskilled people but have a higher fatality rate because more unskilled people do them.
You don't have to enumerate, just acknowledge. Some people think trying to get a selfie with a buffalo is a good idea. You don't have to tell them all the was it could end badly, just that it likely will. Same for the person hiking something like Zion. They should be prepared for any relatively expected contingency, and if they don't know what those are, they are unprepared to do so.
The picture thing is such a small part. You'd have to also do that for everything else - bear defense/prevention, hot springs, numerous injuries, etc. And you'll still have people who go "I was trying to take a picture with an elk, not a buffalo!".
In many incidents, people are completely misinformed on the degree of risk, or woefully unprepared, which does strike me as tragic. E.g. happy family who takes a pleasant hike a few miles from the car, except they weren’t thinking about the fact it was August in Utah and they only brought 8oz of water.
It’s also evident in her story about getting caught by the river. She thought, I’m not going to do anything crazy like those climbers- and then did something that seemed innocent but was actually far more dangerous.
I think she had fair warning. The story states that the ranger told her that statistically one of them would die that summer. Sure they didn't enumerate all the possible dangers, but who could? It's a wilderness or near wilderness setting with innumerable risks and scenarios.
Simply saying it's so dangerous that one of you should die this summer should be sufficient for someone to then do their own research and take precautions given that the total risks of the area can't be covered.
She was young and assumed it was the mountain climbers who were at risk. Is that her own fault? Yes. Would it still be tragic if youthful hubris & ignorance took her life in a senseless accident? Also yes.
But everyone I encountered in risk sports knew the difference between "smart crazy" vs "dumb crazy".
It is the difference between using knowledge, skill, technology, and mental focus to reduce risk to manageable levels, vs "getting away with it".
Getting away with it, riding on PDL — Pure Dumb Luck — can work for a long time. Until it doesn't, and you're dead. Like those YouTube idiots in the article. Getting away with it is just Russian Roulette with a different name and method.
Yet by using knowledge, skill, technology, and mental focus, people can live entire careers in situations that would reliably kill us in seconds, everythign from mountaineering, deep underwater, aviation, space, racecar driving, and more. Understand the risks, the skills to avoid them, the technology to minimize them, and pay attention, and you'll likely be rewarded with a lifetime of risky and rewarding adventures.
Read the books, take the lessons, get some good coaching and apprenticing, and don't cheap out on good gear (as they say, if you've got only a $10 head, then fine, get a $10 helmet, otherwise...). Also, listen to your body and the surroundings. If the conditions or your body is off, you don't have to TODAY climb that route, do that dive, whatever; you can do it or another one tomorrow.
In my experience, some people operate on PDL because they never learned about risk in general, or are incapable of operating differently.
If you get hurt as a kid in a lower stakes fashion, you start to learn that breaking the rules hurts. That opportunity for lower stakes learning might be shrinking as we legislate away some "risky" stuff.
Some people simply can't handle the "constraints" of being responsible... like my wife. Her favorite quote is "I just want to live life". No thoughts to "what if?" or being prepared. If some stranger held the same beliefs and died, I still wouldn't feel bad - that's the way they chose to live thier life.
>>operate on PDL because they never learned about risk in general
Yup, humans are generally awful at understanding and managing risk, and it is in no small part because there is almost anti-training about risk outside of high-risk activities, and even some of those are very low on guidance and high on PDL.
>> I still wouldn't feel bad - that's the way they chose to live thier life.
True, 'tho I feel like it is my better to not die soon-ish doing what I love, but enjoy many decades of doing what I love; doing it a little smarter and sometimes not quite at Warp-9 every second, so I can do more Warp-9 seconds later.
I used to be an alpine ski racer, downhill my best event. At one national championship, the lower half of the race course was pretty flat and the race organizers decided to spice up one of the drop-offs with a bigger jump, building an illegal ramp before the drop-off (the FIS rules for Downhill stated that features cannot be sloped up before the racers leave the ground, level or down-slope only). I decided I had the knowledge I needed without pushing it on that feature in training so shed some speed every training run. For the several days of training runs before the race, every afternoon we were visiting friends in the hospital with fairly serious injuries from that feature (one back injury never raced again and never fully recovered). By race day, they'd decided to make it legal and shaved off the ramp. I have never felt that I missed out on anything by being aggressive on the top and skipping the Warp-9 attitude there...
Interesting point; I'm not sure if we agree or not.
While I've been very fortunate to have been able to pursue and get training in a variety of activities considered high-risk, I'm amazed at how often it applies to ordinary situations. Plus, an awful lot of ordinary life is much higher-risk than people think.
We don't need extensive experience in sports or motorsports to understand that the difference between wearing a helmet or not in even a stupid little fall where your head hits something hard is the difference between "damn, I scratched my helmet" and your family organizing your funeral. This applies to everyone, and yet it is only this generation that is normalizing wearing helmets on bicycles, etc., and people still vociferously fight motorcycle helmet laws despite mountains of statistics of higher severe injury and death rates among non-helmeted motorcyclists vs. people who wear gear.
While it is ordinary for most people to not only not understand epidemiology and statistics, a significant portion also willfully ignore the advice of those who do. Just because this significant portion exists, should we no longer expect people to either understand something or at least respect those who do?
Most particularly, humans are obviously capable of understanding the difference between getting away with relying on Pure Dumb Luck vs applying knowledge, skill, technology, and attention to managing risk.
Yet, just as obviously, MOST people haven't got a clue and consistently engage in foolish risks, and get injured or dead as a result, whether we're talking about YouTube idiots, people going to COVID parties, or in massive drinking binges, and nevermind understanding anything about engineering risk building bridges, aircraft, or whatever.
It seems an obvious line to draw at understanding risk between using skill/knowledge/tech/attention vs using Pure Dumb Luck that the latter suck at risk management, and objectively most people are in the latter group. Moreover, I'd say more people are in this latter group, and the consequences are more serious, than in other fields, such as saying "most people suck at proper grammar".
Thank you for this. Calculating risks and knowing when to turn back is what keeps my wingsuiting squirrel of a childhood best friend alive to this day, after more than 2000 flights.
I do feel bad when it seems needless. Lost a good friend to an avalanche in an avalanche-prone area, in dangerous conditions (weak layer in the snow from earlier in the season, big wet dump on top, turns into a slab slide so easily). He could and should have known better. He’s at peace now, as are those of us left behind. I just miss my friend.
It's not that simple, though. Even if we can't eliminate them, we can do a lot to minimize the risks involved in fun, dangerous activities.
Look at people like Ayrton Senna. Died doing what he loved, but he didn't have to, and the changes that his death inspired made F1 racing much safer without sacrificing the hair-raising speed. He also probably would have lived if the sport's governing body had learned from a prior serious crash on the ultimately fatal corner.
Personally, I still feel bad about deaths like that.
Didn't Senna also have some religious thing that led home to believe he might die that day, but still chose to race? If it the safety upgrades were so easily identifiable, then why didn't people demand them sooner?
The solutions implemented where only discovered/developed because of the crash. We can go back in time and see how many people would have been saved by seatbelts and airbags. I would guess there are additional future safety stuff that future people could look back on us the same way. It's just reality and I don't feel bad about that.
Winter Storm Elliott was a good reminder that even in urban areas sometimes nature is going to make a solid effort to kill you. Nature deserves our respect, and everyone should do some basic preparation for the potential hazards where they live.
How many people have road flares in their car? Or blankets? Or some sort of emergency heat source? These things don't take up much space, are cheap to acquire, and easy to maintain. They can save your life or someone else's.
The engine is your primary heat source. Your primary heat source failing is the emergency. Thus the need for an emergency source as a backup. Or at least a bivy sack or some other way to not freeze.
Moose do not fuck around. I was solo camping just off Death Canyon trail in Grand Tetons in September of 1998 and a bull moose appeared a bit up the hill from me and started bellowing and shaking his horns at me. I really had no where to go, so I pressed myself up against a small tree, no really knowing what was going on or what to do. Just then two female moose charged through my camp down towards the stream a couple of hundred yards away. After that the bull turned and wandered around me downhill.
Turns out I had set up my tent on a barely-visible trail that they were probably accustomed to using to get up and down the slope. I don't know if I was really in any danger, but I gained more respect for moose after that.
Ironically, I'd spent the entire hike that day worrying about a bear encounter, but the only time I saw a bear was from long distance, across the valley, a mother and her cub.
My family vacations growing up were often to National Parks, and Glacier is definitely my favorite.
On my first trip there, when I was hiking with my family on the Iceberg Lake trail, a couple appeared running back towards us with their bear spray pointed behind them. We were at first concerned that they were running from a bear, but a few moments later, a moose appeared behind them trotting down the trail. We turned around and booked it back down the trail until we found a spot where we could get off the trail behind some trees, and the moose ended up turning off.
That was quite a scare at the time, and it could have ended very poorly, but it makes for a great story now.
I enjoyed reading this but I have a mixed opinion on it at the end.
The rules and reasoning seem weak. Rule #1 (be prepared) seems fine. Rule #2 (be respectful) Seems to blur the distinction between respecting the danger and respecting your impact on the environment. You should of course do the latter, but not because you will be less likely to get hurt. Rule #3 (trust the statistics) I don't know what they're trying to get at, if there were fewer than 8 deaths per 10 million visits that would imply that it's a safe activity. They completely incorrectly say that the majority of deaths are men aged 55-64, when in fact that's just the largest group (we assume, the original report treats gender and age separately, but only 19% of deaths are in that age group). Even the source page mislabels the graph for this one.
Overall I just would have rewritten or cut out the end. It was what I thought was an interesting discussion on human actions but then it turned into something prescriptive with weak reasoning.
Looking at the end again this seems very likely. In fact I'm not even sure I read the "repeat these" paragraph the first time, as that one hammers home your point.
It's impressive how quickly things can go south. Camping in Gunnison National Park a year or two ago when a severe snowstorm blew in that we had zero warning of. Went from sunny and fairly warm to a foot of snow and 10 degree weather over night. We did not have the equipment nor the experience for that kind of cold, and while the first night was ok, it was the next night when the ground froze beneath us that we realized how dangerous this really was. I woke up that night with only what I can assume was mild hypothermia. Couldn't get warm, heart beating like crazy and I kept throwing up.
Ended up having to sleep in the car, and even that really wasn't enough to stay warm without having to turn the car on every few hours. Roads were frozen and impassable so if anything had really gone south, we'd have been screwed.
Since then we obviously educated ourselves a lot and improved our winter camping gear and now we actively seek out cold weather camping.
(1) always know the risks you are getting into - while she was an experienced outdoorsperson, the author clearly had little to know awareness of the dangers of moving water.
(2) statistically, things happen outside your control - and our natural response is to pretend it can't happen to us because we follow the rules, but that's not true. Sometimes lightning hits you, or the drunk driver slams into your car, or your foot slips in a place where there's no margin for error.
To me, (2) is the more important point, and can be lost in the harrowing story that she uses to make point (1). You can do everything right, whether that is in the outdoors or driving on a highway, and still become a fatality. When we pretend it couldn't happen to us, because we are better prepared, respect the environment, etc, we are kidding ourselves.
The outdoors may bring this into starker focus because the margin for error is lower, but the point applies throughout our lives.
My friend's brother in law was a river guide- 25 years old, arms like tree trunks, wearing his life jacket and helmet, and with years of experience. Drowned anyway while kayaking one summer afternoon. It was a terrible loss, he was a wonderful person. Rivers are dangerous.
I feel like the phrase "you only regret what you didn't do" is survivorship bias. I'm pretty confident the majority of the people that die in these situations were not happy to die.
"Nobody lays in their deathbed regretting..." Not everybody gets a deathbed. Some people get an 'oh no' and then it's lights out. Some people just get the lights out.
Rivers are no joke. Took my kids on a chill, grandparent friendly "lazy" river at a campground years ago. One of them flipped their tube on the only hazard half-way down and while we were safe she was in a panic. Fast forward to the same river years later, me and the (older) kids are set to exit the river on a fast shallow rocky area and all of us were almost swept off our feet and (most likely) badly injured. I had to grip my daughters arm so tight I was worried she'd be bruised.
Heat Stroke was something that really took me from my last hostile environment course. Sure bombs bangs and bullets are the things most think about in those types of hostile climbs, but I expect if I go to Ukraine for a few weeks I might have a bomb land on my head. The Matthew Power case it what really stuck with me.
He was a journalist who lived in New York, it was winter and well below freezing for weeks and he'd acclimatized, but he agreed to go for a walk with a friend in Uganda. So he flew there overnight, landed, went out drinking and catching up, then headed off on a walk along the Nile in 100F+ weather. They were fairly well prepared, had emergency satelite communication etc. First few days were fine, but then they headed off the road. Only a few miles, then over the course of an hour he went from needing a short break, to being delirious, struggled to drink, then finally passed out. The rescue helicopter they had the coverage for didn't get there in time - literally two hours from "can we pause a minute" to "he's dead".
Power was an experienced traveller, on a decent expedition, with good support. Not a flip-flop wearing tourist you find up half way up a mountain with no map and a twisted ankle. A walk for a few miles from a road in 30C sun is the kind of thing you may think will end up with some sunburn if you forget to wear a hat, not something that will kill a 39 year old before a helicopter can reach him.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadRaw nature is scary and easily able to kill you.
Unless you have specific examples that you're thinking of here.
On any given mountain climb, maybe. But overall? I don't know. A coworker of mine who liked mountaineering made lots of acquaintances in that lifestyle, and he told me they are often missing limbs and show lots of ugly scars, and have lots of near-death anecdotes about themselves. I'm talking about people who do this either for a living or as an all-consuming lifestyle, not casuals.
He told me of a girl, a pro mountaineer, who was missing several fingers and had plenty of teeth knocked out. Her skin looked terrible, too. And he told me this is common. Her boyfriend was also a mountaineer, because that's yet another common fact: mountaineers band together, it's difficult to be in a couple with one if you don't find that lifestyle fascinating.
Another friend who does parachuting (from airplanes) told me he knows lots of people who do BASE jumping (or even worse, those senseless "wingsuit" jumpers) and they tend to die young. They do a lot of it, always chasing a more extreme high, until one day they simply don't make it.
The "don't put this plastic bag on your mouth" warnings come about because the public supports those laws/cases. Those people are at the point were they rely on other to be responsible for them rather than using common sense. Those laws/cases create an environment where people come to expect warnings for everything rather than rely on their own common sense.
I do think you're right that day to life would cause more harm without any warnings, at least for certain people. The people who are responsible for themselves are generally going to be ok in either situation. The people who are happy-go-lucky and rely on others to think for them and arlt high risk in either situation, sometimes regardless of if warnings are present.
The plastic bag warning is aimed at parents of children mostly. Babies, love crinkly things. I know that my son when he started crawling would seek out the on floor garbage cans to play with the bags we used as a liner.
If you have someone who is not thinking about the ramifications, they would let the kid play with the bag, kid would end up putting it over their head(yay, surround sound) and some percentage would die.
There are similar warnings on buckets, about drowning. Kids that age love water, if they manage to get themselves head first in a 5 gallon bucket it only takes an inch of liquid of so for them to drown. Most people wouldn't think it takes so little.
A car can easily crush you, electricity can stop your heart. Don't be paralyzed in fear, but still think a bit of the worst plausible case.
Safety is an illusion, you never know when there's a meteor with your name on it.
>The river was swollen with alpine runoff.
Red flags right immediately.
If you ever hear 3 horns blasts, get out immediately. A dam might release.
I would NOT go down any side forks. Just like the author I have been messed up and thrown off my kayak by downed trees on a fork. Luckily the water was waist deep and I could stand right away.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_current
The other 1% of the time is when you are close to the mouth of a bay or some other feature that creates a current independent of the dynamics in the surf zone. You'll know that's the case if the current stays strong after you're past the break. If it's too strong for you to swim against it, then you're in trouble and should start waving for help.
Rip tides pull out, so let them pull you past the break then swim side to side. You shouldn't need more than 15-20 min to get past the worst of it, and can work laterally to inbound waves.
We also saw lifeguards retrieve a drowned child. They worked on him for about fifteen minutes in front of the parents before stopping, and the ambulance took him away.
The beaches were marked with red flags as far as the eye could see, along with signs in English and Spanish clearly indicating that this meant swimming was prohibited, as it was unsafe. Many people paid no heed to the warnings.
The ocean doesn't give a shit about your life.
People will go swimming in the ocean and in all myriad of bays and estuaries that are more than capable of having enough surf to kill them depending on the weather. You just need to exercise good judgement about how much surf is too much.
It is fairly safe at most public beaches if: * you follow the posted signs for rules (e.g. where it's safe to dive, staying in marked areas), flags for current conditions * pay attention to weather conditions * know (roughly) when and how much of a change the tide will bring
Unfortunately, a significant number of people don't follow the rules, or underestimate the risk.
There is a reason many public beaches located within an urban center have lifeguards and patrols.
Mayo Clinic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FH9b1LiwY
WebMD Spot the Drowning Person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beNheoRRdKk
Another one is Bondi Beach - you can find episodes on YouTube. There are a bunch of examples of rescues and how little notice any of the people on the beach or other swimmers nearby give to people struggling.
http://spotthedrowningchild.com/
Low head dams are the drowning machine, and they can look very safe and simple.
edit: link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVDpqphHhAE
What an eery coincidence. I hope it's not a bad omen that I keep coming across this topic today...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Watched this video a year later and it made me think... how deep was that water, and was it really as calm as it seemed? Yikes.
Tom Scott - https://youtu.be/mCSUmwP02T8
The Most Dangerous River in THE WORLD is HOW DEEP?! - https://youtu.be/uJFQXT6PIP8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Wharfe
If you stand (and especially walk) in a fast current, you’re asking to get your foot caught and then drowned.
There aren't even any classed rapids in this area its more of a lazy river thing. An hour or so away there are some cool rapids leftover from prior Olympic Games that has a consistent dam release.
We were on sit on top kayaks.
What's amazing from this article, and from others like it, is that even being reasonably knowledgeable is not a guarantee of anything. I mean, better be knowledgeable, of course -- but even people who should know better die and get caught in freak accidents. Or simply, one day they let their guard down. After plenty of near death experiences, the author of this article was still doing some dumb shit, she hadn't learned the lesson by her own admission.
This isn't an argument against research; of course you should know the dangers and treat the environment carefully. But even this isn't a guarantee of survival.
Looks entirely harmless but is incredibly dangerous in some parts. Apparently the river "turns on it's side" creating a narrow but very deep stream with very fast underwater currents.
I’ve lost friends to drowning in calm looking waters where they got trapped in hidden potholes in river bed.
Water bodies are no joke.
It's powerful because there's a lot of it.
Also it's deceptive as hell. See all the stories here about strange pockets of rivers that almost killed people, or the author's own note about the 252 degree hot pockets in Yellowstone Lake with an average survival time of 20 minutes.
I think when people see water they're tempted to think it's a nice pool or a lazy river to enjoy - when really it's most likely a death trap.
Frequency/exposure matters. A lot of people swim. Not a lot of people choose the more extreme hike that's borderline on rock climbing.
The danger of the typical or average swim is basically nil. Worrying about it other than just knowing there's baseline danger (that you can amplify by poor decisions if you choose to, but same goes for everything in life).
It's not a lie, because the results are the results. And spreading awareness of the outcomes is about reducing the exposure that you mentioned, especially amongst the unprepared/unskilled.
And just downstream, world class kayakers paddle Great Falls for fun and practice.
It's wild (and sad) to think about the two groups of river users.
(Let's not forget how many people die per year just by falling from a step-ladder etc.)
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that should I ever venture out into the wilderness, I would definitely not survive. I lack basic survival skills and nature would eat me alive.
That being said, I always admired folks who could go camping for days (or weeks), who could cook up a warm (and edible) meal over a campfire.
Don't think this is the part people romanticize, I think it's the whole "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't think I want one" and the "Instead, I will walk into the wild" that does it for people.
He could have poisoned himself with something else, or been attacked by a wild animal, or treaded on some treacherous ground and broken a leg, all of this outside the reach of human help, and he did this on purpose.
> "Instead, I will walk into the wild"
But this is what I don't get. "I will commit suicide by walking into the wild without resources or knowledge", what's admirable about that? He was basically playing Russian Roulette! I mean, I get that suicide itself is the stuff of romantic ideation, maybe that's the thing?
I don't think it's the suicide aspect, and - maybe besides the point - personally I don't think the guy was trying to die (not anymore or less than a freeclimber).
Maybe the Webster 1913 definition for "romantic" can help shed a light:
> Characterized by strangeness or variety; suggestive of adventure; suited to romance; wild; picturesque; -- applied to scenery; as, a romantic landscape.
I know what "romantic" means. I don't think McCandless was a romantic; I think he was reckless. His romanticism was entirely artificial -- Krakauer's opinion that he "threw away the map" on purpose since there are no really unexplored lands anymore hints at this -- and he didn't need to live this rough life, he strived to put himself in harm's way. Someone who crosses the highway with their eyes closes is not a romantic, they are simply stupid.
And like I said in another comment, I think he completely misread Jack London and failed to learn the lesson from that writer: that wilderness is ruthless and will kill you the minute you let your guard down, or simply out of bad luck.
Zooming out a bit, you could also say he died because he churned the philosophy of using the aids and crutches of civilization to maximize his hedonistic well-being at all cost - which is maybe a more interesting and ambiguous point to discuss than whether maps are useful ;)
Many herbivores are poisoned only when desperated to find alternative sources of food. He probably tried and failed to find other sources of food, so he ate legumes, that caused serious damage in their nervous system, and left him unable to walk and hunt anymore
Yet McCandless was essentially reckless rather than heroic. It's not that hard to die if you put yourself in an extreme situation, without preparing yourself or having any safeguards. It's a form of Russian roulette rather than "rejecting society"; though, I suppose, suicide is the ultimate form of rejecting society.
I see that he liked Jack London. So do I! However, I must wonder how thoroughly he read London's work, especially his Klondike gold rush stories, because very often in the stories the main character ends up dead, defeated by bad luck and an unsympathetic wilderness which is hostile to clueless men. I mean, did he read "To Build a Fire"?
The problem with private wilderness survival classes you may find in the community, even the light versions, is that they tend to come with a very particular political slant. And that slant tends toward the paranoid.
I scoff at this notion. Each of us is a weak, fragile hairless monkey. There is no such thing as “civilisation”. It is just other monkeys just like you and me caring about fellow monkeys so much that we go to extremes to protect each other. Civilisation is the term one uses to describe these combined efforts. It is not something which makes you weak, it is the way we choose to cling together and protect each other. It is our way to face the survival challenges.
Although, that is my experience in multiple mid-western states; so it may not translate to other parts of the country.
1. Only go deep into nature (out of cell range) with someone experienced.
2. Obtain a rescue device (Apple satellite cell, Garmin GPS emergency beacon, etc).
3. If stranded in a vehicle stay with the vehicle!
I think the above is probably the most important. Having someone experienced within arms reach would be the best bet when/if shit hits the fan.
Not just that. One can learn a lot from the mere presence of someone more experienced. How do they prepare, what do they bring, how do they pace themselves, how do they make decisions. Basically it makes it more likely that you don’t even get near the bad situation.
And in the Alps, you have areas with so many tourists the path is affectionally called a highway, but it would take 2 hours of hiking to get into cell range because mountains block signals.
I think it depends more on how many people you’re likely to meet per hour than cell range.
This also goes for driving - especially in winter! Do not leave the commonly travelled roads if you don't know what you're doing! A stuck car gets freezing cold quite fast in many places.
Also, pack 2-3x the water you think you will need.
This. Or pack the water you think you need AND have a water filtration system with known locations of accessible water.
It’s a classic case of moral hazard [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
If you wanted to bootstrap by yourself or with other inexperienced friends- I would start by getting a car accessible campsite, and then use that as a base camp. Go on small hikes that take you back to your site. Very few survival skills are needed for that sort of thing- you can get started with a cooler, a grill, and a bundle of firewood.
If you enjoy that, then start using more primitive tools and trying larger hikes in future trips, and you can work your way up to backpacking or whatever your goals are
(and cooking a meal on a camping stove is just cooking, nothing magical)
Do a few of these and try something new out every time. Maybe you want to work on building skills like fire making. Maybe you want to try out new equipment such as using a camping stove with dehydrated food instead of a fire. Or try out techniques like packing all of your stuff in a backpacking pack and take it on hikes to see how what you'd need (and possibly not need) go backpacking.
Once you feel comfortable start expanding out. Maybe try a day hike where you cover more ground (but don't overdo it at first, stay within what you know for a fact you are capable of). Do an out and back one where you start at your car, and end back up at your car. Maybe try going for one night of backpacking to "wilderness" camp sites at a local park. These sites are usually a short hike from where you'll park with no amenities. Practice your skills. Enjoy the nature.
From there figure out what you are enjoying and maximize that. Do you like the hiking? The camping? Just hanging out with friends around a campfire? Do that. It's not about how extreme you can make it, it's about what you like. If hiking makes you miserable and all you want to do is sleep outdoors for a few nights with a stable fire, then there is no shame in sticking to car camping. There will be purists who look down on it, but who cares?
Try new things, find what you enjoy, and don't push yourself more than you know you are capable of.
- If you go hiking, take a small backpack. It should have an extra layer of clothing, some snacks, and water, at minimum.
- Never eat anything unless you are 100% certain you know what it is and it is non-toxic. Only drink from a lake or stream in an emergency, and then purify or boil the water if possible.
- Always bring a hat. Like the girl in the article, I've found myself in unexpected relentless sun.
- Wear sensible shoes. The definition of 'sensible' depends on what you're doing, but when in doubt go slightly overkill.
- Never go into nature alone. Ideally, go with a group of at least 3 people. Then if 1 person is seriously hurt, 1 person can stay with them and the last person can go for help.
- Always tell someone where you are going and when you plan to return. When you get back, tell them you're safe. For a simple weekend campout, that means telling a friend or family member. For a strenuous full-day hike, that means stopping at a ranger station before and after the hike.
- Never go off trail (both because it's easy to get lost, and because it's bad to trample mother nature).
- Always have maps - ideally paper ones. Even for a simple trail, pull out a cell phone and take a picture of the map at the trailhead.
- Bring more supplies (including food and water) than you think you need. With each trip you'll learn more about what you wish you had and what you brought but didn't use.
- Bring backups of critical things. Two flashlights, two ways to start fires, and two knives of some description (they don't have to be fancy).
- Have a realistic view of your limits (and your gear's limits). Seeing a nifty rock face doesn't mean you know how to climb it. Even if you know how, you probably don't have climbing equipment with you.
- Animals are not your friends. Research in advance what animals to expect wherever you're going, and what precautions to take. Camping in bear country is different than camping in raccoon country, for example.
- Research where you're going and pack accordingly. Is there running water? If not, plan how you will get and purify water. Are fires allowed? If not, plan how you will cook your food.
If this whole list is intimidating, just start simply and enjoy figuring things out - it can be a lot of fun as long as you come prepared (and try to over plan and over-pack at first while you learn).
Being an Australian it always entertains when you hear Americans talking about how everything in Australia is out to kill you... Truth is, almost nothing in Australia is out to kill you unless you really annoy it and you are far more likely to have problems with dying of exposure and heat exhaustion.
In the US on the other hand it seems you have lots of real predators who are out looking for a free feed that you need to take real care about. I had no idea raccoons were potentially dangerous.
I suppose it's all about what you are familiar with. I have no problem heading off walking in the Australian bush, with full knowledge that there are snakes out there that could bite me if I did something stupid but you rarely see them and if you do they are flaked out on a rock asleep. I'd be very cautious about bushwalking in the US, as I've no idea of the risks.
Then make sure you let them know you are back.
Far too many people get lost and nobody knows where they have gone.
1. Look up the 10 Essentials and learn what they are/how to use them.
2. Search for Wilderness First Aid (2 day) or Wilderness First Responder (10 day) courses in your area. The focus is on how to assess and treat problems after they've occurred, but in the process you'll learn what the potential dangers are and how to avoid them or notice them early. For example, you can get hypothermia at surprisingly high temperatures (50 degrees F) in the right conditions, and some of the symptoms are paradoxical.
3. This one might be a bit controversial, but look up the Boy Scouts of America requirements for tenderfoot, second class, and first class scout. Before kids can start earning badges, the Boy Scouts require them to learn a fairly rigorous and comprehensive set of skills in order to not die in the process (first aid, camping, starting a fire and camp cooking, navigation, knot tying, swimming, etc., as well as some ideological requirements that you can skip). Some of these, like what to do when you're lost, you can learn from books or YouTube videos targeted to scouts. For others, you'll at least know what you don't know and the right words to look up to find classes. For example, searching for 'map skills' might not find what you're looking for, but there may be an 'orienteering' club in your area.
There are some big ones like the Sierra Club in CA, Appalachian Mountain Club in the northeast, the Mountaineers and Mazamas in the northwest, etc. They might have classes or trips that interest you, or be able to point you to smaller clubs in your area.
Clubs are usually lower-key than classes, and they go out regularly. So you can get a lot of experience and advice for free, or a small membership fee. (And maybe make some new friends.)
There are also activity-specific organizations and clubs out there. The American Alpine Club has local chapters of climbers. American Whitewater has a network of affiliate river running clubs. Etc.
1) Just go out to a forest/whatever and eat a packed lunch.
See what you're missing. Maybe an insulated container for food/drinks? Camp-compatible cutlery? Something to sit on? Better shoes? Windproof clothes?
When you feel comfortable enough, graduate to step 2
2) Make a meal in the wild, maybe have a nap or read a book.
Get a Trangia or Primus gas cooker and some ingredients you can cook a meal with. A ready-made camping meal is just fine or you can get fancy and cook everything from scratch.
Again see if you're missing something. Maybe something to wash the dishes? If you're cooking something, you either need to carry more water or have a way of purifying an existing source. Maybe a small solar panel + powerbank for your device(s). A better backpack that can fit all the gear without weighing you down?
For napping, nothing beats a Ticket To The Moon hammock. They're light but durable and you're not laying on the ground. They do need trees though, so for deserts they're not really optimal :) The pro-models with the integrated mosquito net are amazingly simple to set up.
Again, repeat steps 1 & 2 until you feel comfortable enough to move to the next step:
3) Sleeping outdoors
This is the costliest bit. The two main routes to take are either hammock or tent. For both you need a sleeping bag. Good tents are expensive, so maybe look into borrowing or renting. For hammock camping you'll want an underquilt and a tarp on top so you don't get cold or wet.
I recommend being brave about this and doing the first night(s) on your backyard or a friend's. If there are any issues you can just abort and walk inside.
After you're comfortable and equipped for all three steps, you can start planning longer multi-day trips along popular paths.
I heavily recommend getting/renting a Garmin inReach if you're going solo or outside of cell range.
Admittedly this gave me a chuckle. Most people don't go that fast, but with the right kind of car this no big deal on the Autobahn.
I recently floored it for hours in a Dacia Jogger, going its absolute Vmax of 175 km/h, and that was uncomfortable. The same in an Audi or BMW is hardly noticeable.
But seriously: I've had the old lady thing happen to me more than once.
That had me laughing.
Funny story: I once, long ago in the corridor stopped to help a bunch of people in a Trabant, the engine had seized and it really wasn't going to go anywhere so I offered to tow them behind my 230E, which could easily do that. They agreed happily and we hooked them up, and one of their party switched to my car to show me where to go (illegal to go off the corridor, but screw it, this had massive consequences later on but at the time I was still totally oblivious). So we're back on the highway and doing 50 or so and the guy asks 'can't you go any faster?'. I say sure, but what about the tow? 'They will have to follow ;)'. Ok, so doing a 110 or so (where you could legally go maybe 90 at the time) for an hour took us to Frankfurt a/d Oder where they lived, I dropped them off at home and the guy that drove the Trabbi came to me and said that they'd never gone that fast with it before...
Good times. Obviously, for East Germans before the wende there was a lot of misery (same in Poland, my destination) but there was also a strong camaraderie, 'us against the system'.
> there was also a strong camaraderie, 'us against the system'
I think this is what gets lost in prosperity, and what causes some of the current spiritual misery. You simply don't need other people anymore if you have enough money, which in turn destroys community. Maybe the land of plenty is a dystopia, and we're not meant to live like this for extended periods of time.
On AutoBahn stretches old M3s and Mercedes E190 are capable of 150 mph and they do absolutely floor it. The only risk it's mechanical failure or tyre blowing up.
I still mantain that for those looking for kinetic adrenaline the big Cigarette powerboats are better, even though they are slower than cars you are essentially always surrounded by nothing and the feeling is more intense (even though they are slower than cars) because you are in the wind yourself and the jumping on the waves makes it seems even more kinetic.
German here, it's not fast for the Autobahn, per se. The issue is though talking about the speed on its own is nearly meaningless, the most important factor becomes the road and what speed it is designed for. There are plenty of stretches on the Autobahn where there is no speed limit AND you can "safely" go 250+kph. Although I personally get uneasy at speeds beyond that because it starts to feel like you're entering an event horizon where unforeseen things on the road ahead are now beyond your ability to meaningfully react to them.
That being said, there are lots of stretches on the Autobahn where the speed limit is 80-100kph, often with good reason.
As I was about to cross the highway a car come sliding around the bend more or less sideways. I stopped and watched it slide past. I could tell it was going to miss me by 10 feet or more, but afterward I couldn't stop thinking: What if it had been headed towards me? Could I have gotten out of the way in time? What if I'd slipped? I couldn't believe how close I might have come to dying without even thinking about it. I'll never get out of the car in a storm again, at least not without thinking very carefully about the situation first.
My other near miss experience was staying at a bread-and-breakfast farmhouse in Portugal. I had taken a shower, and was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, when I noticed the light above the mirror was crooked. It was one of those swiveling can fixtures, so I reached up to adjust it. I knew it wouldn't be hot since I'd just turned it on, so I grabbed it firmly and then asked myself why it was vibrating. And for that matter why was my whole arm vibrating? When I realized I was being shocked I was able to let go and spent 20 minutes pacing around my room making sure I wasn't dead. You really can't do worse than standing barefoot, soaking wet, on a stone floor, and grabbing a live fixture, can you?
If anyone would like to explain why that didn't kill me I'm all ears.
I've had a similar experience, where (at the age of about 10) I touched an exposed 120v AC wire on a running water pump, while standing in a muddy field, and I only got a mild vibrating feeling from it.
Depends on how it is wired. Sometimes lights are wired so that the switch comes before the fixture, sometimes after. One of several reasons you should always turn power off at the breaker when fiddling with the wiring, instead of assuming it won't be hot if the switch is off.
Edit: Or this one...
...where "load" is like a 20 watt LED bulb or something.the parallel resistance is lower
And once you've turned the power off, test wit with a non-contact voltage detector. A brand name one that's actually been built to UL/CE standards and is subject to actual recalls/etc is under $30. It's a straightforward, pretty much foolproof way to make sure you don't get yourself shocked.
A multimeter is, in theory, a fine alternative but in practice is not. The non-contact detector detects the presence of the fluctuating magnetic field from A/C. A multimeter measures the difference in potential between two points. If you were to, say, have 120V on from same phase on both hot and neutral in an outlet, it would read 0V. If, say, the ground were also not connected then you'd also get 0V testing either against ground. By all accounts there is no voltage in the plug. If, say, each side of the plug were on a different breaker you might think you'd killed the power while it's still live. (Yes, this is based on a true story.) The only way to avoid this is to make sure you have a known good ground to test against. Whereas a non-contact voltage detector immediately lights up like a christmas tree telling you this situation is all sorts of fucked up.
commonly the neutral wire has something like 20vac rms on it for a variety of reasons
if you are ungrounded (due to rubber boots or whatever) your body is in series with your capacitance to ground, and that will commonly give you just a mild vibrating feeling or nothing at all
this 'path of least resistance' thing can be pretty misleading, because if you have two resistors in parallel, the least resistance is always the parallel resistance (i.e. current through both resistors in inverse proportion to their resistances) and not just one resistor or the other
Electricity doesn't take the path of least resistance. It takes all paths. Think of it as a resistor network:
R2 and R3 are parallel. R2 is you, R3 is the "path of least resistance".If R1 is sufficiently high, e.g. the light was off but the switch interrupted the neutral side, and you touched the neutral side (i.e. the lamp was between mains and you), then the "path of least resistance" matters: R1 and the parallel set of R2/R3 form a voltage divider, and the smaller the combined resistance of the right part is, the lower the voltage across you.
That voltage is all that matters. If R1 is small enough to be insignificant, e.g. because you're touching mains and R3 isn't a short to ground, the voltage across you will be mains voltage.
Would the wetness have actually helped? Why go through all that higher resistance human flesh when the current can go straight to ground via the electrolyte solution that's around you instead?
Skin is also hydrophobic. You're unlikely to have a complete circuit with no breaks on the outside of your body, unless you're currently standing in the shower.
My guess would be not enough of the main current was passing across your heart to kill you? I didn't think mains electricity was necessary powerful enough to kill people in most scenarios, just that it is powerful enough to do it in an unlucky few. I'd also imagine the floor wasn't really conducting to earth.
My guess is that it went only through the one hand, and the sensation in the arm is just a side effect.
And that came from the "ground" pin of an outlet! Except that the building (in a third-world country that I'll leave unnamed here) hadn't been wired correctly, as I learned the hard way.
Though if there's one thing we've learned from the article, there will be plenty of people waiting in the wings of the Intenet to sputter "Karma!" and "Darwin!" when you do.
Aside, if you ever feel like saying that sort of thing, take an idea, principal, or religious icon that has a deep meaning to you, or in the latter case, someone whose work you think was influential and great. Fix that image in your mind, think "serves you right, asshole", and scream the word or the name out at the top of your lungs. Then reflect on how fucking stupid that was.
Uh...
That's fucking stupid because I presumably picked an idea or person that's completely unrelated to the concept of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". Also because I'm at the top of my lungs. If I called out something like "Midgley'd!" it wouldn't share those reasons for being fucking stupid at all.
I've had a few mains shocks before as well, a fair few years ago, and what saved me was live and neutral touched the same hand. I now have an inductance tester I use first, then follow up with multimeter and only THEN do I start whatever I'm doing.
I was fine. The driver was some kid that stole their parents car. The kid seemed uninjured. The parents were I guess chasing them in another car as they arrived only a few seconds after the wreck.
Allow me to even further your disbelief. Nearly the same thing happened to me again years later. Except the second time was a motorcycle. I narrowly sidestepped a motorcycle on a mountain road that had taken the turn too fast while I was looking over a marked "scenic viewpoint". The driver in this case though I do not know if they lived. As they did go over the side of the ravine into very rough rocks and ground. They were alive when Ambulance took them away though.
He saw a car barreling towards him as he was walking on the street, instinctually jumped up, rolled over the windshield and roof and landed safely, albeit not on his feet.
The lesson here is this: lightning strikes twice (frustratingly, the usual idiom is as wrong as can be). In other words, if you observe an outcome and have no other data whatsoever about the conditions that produced that outcome, it is safe to assume that the conditions continue to exist to allow the outcome to happen again.
In this case, the existence of a car that has spun out around a curve is the clue that cars will continue to spin out along that curve.
Whatever caused the accident is just as likely to cause another car to go in, ie oil or coolant on track, or even debris from the current incident.
Same applies on the roads I guess, especially in poor conditions.
Also, in confrontations where you are outnumbered, keep one of the suspects between you and the rest. Discourages anybody taking a shot at you when their friend/accomplice is in the line of fire.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/amp/news/article/can-li...
> Believe it or not, this long-held myth is far from the truth. While the odds of being struck by lightning are low, the chances of lightning striking the same place twice are high. Lightning can, and often will, hit the same spot multiple times.
That is, seeing the strike shows that things are primed at the moment. Seeing a singed tree is not. (That make sense?)
That said, I can see how that still fits the idea.
If you observe an extremely unlikely event, you should update your Bayesian prior about how likely that event is.
Close in thought to each other, but still different things. Granted, I think your point still fully holds. There is a decay function for the likelihood of repeating events. And if you don't have evidence that what you are looking at is old, much safer to assume it is not and that the circumstances are still primed for it to happen again.
Lightning will not strike a TREE again because usually it destroys the tree in some way, changing it's height. But for many other things (buildings, mountains, etc), lightning will happily strike it over and over again.
Is the car in a ditch for a truly unlikely reason, or there a hidden lightning rod there? Perhaps you shouldn't assume a seemingly unlikely event won't happen again.
I was out on pescadero creek road and saw a guy had wrapped his 911 turbo around a tree. This particular bend would send you off a hillside if not for the trees. I slowed not just to gawk at the loss of a great car or to have sympathy for a man who just lost a valuable asset but cause I was wondering, “how did he manage that? Is something wrong with the road?” Didn’t notice anything wrong with the road but I took it slow anyway.
He probably just took the corner too hot. Waved a happy wave to him as I finished the turn slowly then revved back up to the usual fun speeds to enjoy the remaining 150 bends.
In a lab, sure. In reality you need a lot of amps going into the body to get enough amps across the heart to screw with it. Defibrillators wouldn't be chock full of capacitors if that wasn't the case.
Constantly repeating these sorts of misleading DARE-esque talking points is why nobody takes what the safety preachers have to say seriously.
People find out through life experience that smoking while filling gas, a couple amps from arm to arm, working under suspended loads, side rolling big cylinders long distances, using ladders on less than perfect surfaces and other little stuff like that isn't the instant death and dismemberment that they were told it was supposed to be and that throws doubt at everything else.
You can't lie to people 50% of the time even if it's "for their own good" and expect them to believe the other 50% of stuff you say. Electricity and many other things are sufficiently dangerous that you shouldn't need to lie.
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities and expected outcomes in probabilistic scenarios, especially in when one possible outcome is catastrophic with low probability. Otherwise you wouldn't see so many reckless distracted drivers on the road.
You are advocating for a public communication strategy that only makes sense in some kind of rationalist fantasy world, but not in the real world.
It's not some conspiracy to infantilize the public, it's just good sense to not do dangerous stuff and tempt fate.
Yes, pretty much. 400 people are electrocuted in the US every year, usually in industrial situations. Thousands of people will get shocked today. The odds of a heart problem are low enough that suggesting people should be terrified of light sockets because it may stop their heart is just fearmongering, and reduces the effectiveness of other safety-related communication. This is like California proudly proclaiming that everything causes cancer. Counterproductive.
> Thousands of people will get shocked today
Before I come to any conclusions.
According to [0], “There are also at least 30,000 shock incidents per year that are non-fatal” and “ In the United States, there are approximately 1000 deaths per year, as a result of electrical injuries”
So about 1 in 30(ish) if we assume they accounted for nonreporting. If we assume they underreported by 10x, 1/300 is still pretty bad odds
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448087/
That 3% number is causally intertwined with the fact that professionals take safety very seriously, and most non-professionals are afraid of electrical stuff and generally do try to take precautions around it, within the limits of their own knowledge.
The former puts the information into the hands of individuals, and let's them draw the appropriate conclusions. With the latter, you risk someone saying "I played Russian roulette and it was fine, this whole safety thing is BS”
This risk is even bigger if millions of people have tried and survived the purportedly deadly activity, such as home wiring shocks.
I said mains voltage won't kill you every time but it definitely can. We wouldn't put it in residential settings if it was instant death. The problem is that the conditions that can lead to a deadly accident don't trigger any of our ape-brain fear response. Like any risk it should be approached with knowledge and care.
If you think any of the things you listed are fine and safe just because they don't result in "instant death" then I would say we have very different ideas about risk management.
I don't appreciate you calling me a liar for presenting facts and urging caution.
>The problem is that the conditions that can lead to a deadly accident don't trigger any of our ape-brain fear response.
No. The problem here is that you are peddling fear to get the reaction you want out of people. Potential energy, electric or otherwise is potentially dangerous. Pretending like it's more dangerous than it is to scare people straight is bad. Just because reality doesn't scare people into behaving how you like doesn't entitle you to be dishonest.
>If you think any of the things you listed are fine and safe just because they don't result in "instant death" then I would say we have very different ideas about risk management.
If you think it's ok to just lie to people because you think the end goal is noble I don't care what your ideas are.
If you're wet though, your impedance is lower, so a lot more current can flow through you. That makes it much more dangerous to touch electrical stuff. Same with being barefoot.
Our bodies also have capacitance (complex impedance), which makes us more sensitive to AC than DC.
What I don't get is why do we still use differential circuit breakers while connecting neutral with ground instead of monitoring line impedance a thousand times a second. You'd trip the circuit breaker when connecting (including touching) neutral or phase to ground, without endangering the user (currently we only detect a user touching phase via the current flowing through them).
Have the circuit self-test multiple times a second, and use 10kV (like livestock fences) with very low capacity to measure impedance: give a serious jolt to the person touching a wire, with no danger.
They said that you can die if you're shocked. If you have a substantial chance of death doing something it's common sense to avoid that thing, especially when it's trivial to do so. If you want to be a manly man who don't need no safety, go for it, but you're setting up a straw man in OP's post and safety awareness in general that isn't there.
Disrupting the heart's rhythm is way easier than restoring it. Especially if the disrupting current got in through punctured skin (which the defibrillator is not allowed to do)
> a couple amps from arm to arm
This is very bad advice. A couple amps at 220VAC is devastating if actually delivered inside your body. The reason people routinely survive mains shocks is the current doesn't actually get through due to intact dry skin, pure (poorly conducting) water, no path across their body, or no path to ground, which is all a matter of luck.
But that's what a defib does. It disrupts your heart's rhythm. And then you hope it goes back to normal.
If you through further education come to possess a more nuanced view of risk analysis this doesn't invalidate the simpler process it just adds value to your understanding. For instance YOU don't seem to have concluded that there is zero risk through your more nuanced understanding. Why are you assuming everyone is is dumber?
I think that’s because most accidental contact doesn’t produce much current across your heart. Touching the two wires of mains electricity with one hand? Not a good idea, but unlikely to kill you. Touching one with your left and one with your right hand? Way more risky. Grabbing one with your left and one with your right hand? Even more risky.
And of course, modern circuitry often has circuit breakers that in many cases rapidly stop the current from flowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device#Purpos...:
“To reduce the risk of electrocution, RCDs should operate within 25–40 milliseconds with any leakage currents[clarification needed] (through a person) of greater than 30 mA, before electric shock can drive the heart into ventricular fibrillation, the most common cause of death through electric shock. By contrast, conventional circuit breakers or fuses only break the circuit when the total current is excessive (which may be thousands of times the leakage current an RCD responds to). A small leakage current, such as through a person, can be a very serious fault, but would probably not increase the total current enough for a fuse or overload circuit breaker to isolate the circuit, and not fast enough to save a life.”
There was also a stainless fryer on the counter, but insulated with plastic legs, so I did some experimenting by completing the circuit a few ways:
- Counter to rail: weak shock
- Counter to fryer: stronger shock
- Fryer to rail: nothing
I reasoned that the rail and fryer were both grounded, the fryer more so because the metal exterior was wired directly to the ground pin in a 3-prong electrical plug. The problem was the counter.
I was pretty stoked: as a lowly ski lodge porter / custodian I'd diagnosed an electrical fault in the cafeteria! Everyone working there was way above my pay grade, but I got the manager's attention and excitedly explained my three experiments. The manager looked annoyed, confirmed that touching the counter and fryer gave a shock, and then unplugged the fryer (thus removing the ground) and went on with the day. As far as I know the counter remained electrified for the rest of the season, or longer.
I'm amazed more people don't get electrocuted.
Usually it's good for one little light zap and then nothing for minutes/hours.
It’s about the closest I’ve come to a head on collision. With my whole family in the car, there was utter silence for the next several minutes.
Pretty sure I nearly died three days ago.
(Then again, feel free to ignore the unsolicited advice of an internet stranger, but if you say you nearly died, then you’re likely in shock to a degree. Maybe this sounds excessive, but consider professional support.)
I used to commute in London for many years on a motorcyle and also raced them for a few years. I've had my share of near misses and ended up in hospital once. That was all somehow different - it was only me in danger usually and at least when racing I was always hyper aware that things can go bad fast.
This was a totally different experience. Completely innocuous one might think, on a road regularly traveled, at legal speeds. I think having my family with me made a big difference to my reaction. It wasn't just me in danger any more.
All I can say is that it took me a long time to regain the appetite for calculated risk. My companion in the scenario seemingly shrugged it right off, but only through keeping talking did I know otherwise.
*(/s)
That v² in there also means that, if enough people follow your advice, we'll eventually start seeing SUVs equipped with reactive armor.
That's far different from proclaiming either that there is no problem or that outcomes are to be measured blindly.
Suddenly [1] isn't so ridiculous anymore...
[1]: https://youtu.be/k7YVxLLIuGM?t=149
I can relate to the shock story. In a school lab I managed to lean on a exposed 220V cable. I remember my arm shaking and hearing a low hum but couldn’t figure out what’s going on. It felt like an eternity until I pulled my arm away but I bet in reality it was just a second.
That kind of thinking makes people resist taking reasonable safety precautions. The reality is that risk varies a lot; while there's no such thing as perfectly safe, there are things you can do that substantially reduce your risk of dying young, such as driving less.
A light fixture generally won't create enough current to kill you. Usually. Probably not worth testing excessively though.
My speculation: most of the power went through the light and only a part of it shocked the OP.
Calling the whole thing nonsense, without elaboration, is confusing at best.
With as resistive as skin is to electricity, 110 isn't usually enough to overcome it and push power through the heart.
Keyword: usually
Modern circuit breakers and outlets have GFCI/AFCI electronics that detect abnormal current leaks to ground and abnormal waveforms, and shut off the circuit. These actually stand a chance of saving you in a scenario like this.
If you're earthed/grounded through your feet though, that's a problem, likewise if it's live on one hand and neutral on the other.
A breaker may provide some protection against electric shock (assuming it's an RCD or RCBO), but I wouldn't like to rely on it.
Portugal is 230V. Not sure what breaker the lighting would be on but in the UK it's not uncommon for a 6A lighting circuit to not be on an RCD at all.
I guess there is a asterisk here if you're also shorting something much more conductive than yourself, since the breaker might cut power before you'd naturally let go and break yourself from the circuit. But that seems like a pretty unlikely situation for most home shocks.
I've lived near two such blind curves in my life, and at each I've seen minor issues like a flat tire turn into catastrophic accidents when the driver parks and someone else comes along and hits them.
The immediate answer might be turn of the circuit breaker, but what if we're in a giant office building? Or I don't have access or know where the circuit breaker is?
Grab them with rubber gloves?
If someone is being shocked, live, then it all depends on the circumstances, but the most generic standard suggestion in various first aid courses seems to be using a non-conductive stick (e.g. broomhandle) to push them away from the source of power or vice versa. They have probably grabbed the thing with their hand and are unable to release it as the hand is cramped, so that may be difficult.
Finding a circuit breaker may be too long. My intuitive guess (though that's not something I have seen recommended) is that intentionally causing a short-circit and trip the breaker might be faster.
Alternatively, throw a scarf or other garment as a loop in between the victim and the source of the shock and use it to pull them away from it from behind them - the garment not being conductive means you'll be safe.
[1] e.g. https://www.amazon.com/100-500V-Electrical-Screwdriver-Detec...
What kills people is current, not voltage. With AC having your heart beat 50 times a second can also cause you to die hours or even days after receiving a shock, but even that requires enough current to flow and cross your skin resistance. Go to ghe hospital even if you are alive and feel well after an electrical shock! Your heart may have suffered from this.
That being said, there can be many things at play here. E.g. there could have been contact resistance between the live wire and the fixture, which would mean the current that could have flown through your body was limited by that resistance. The reason why you can touch an insulated wire is because there are megaohms of resistance between your hand and the wire. Lower that resistance gradually and there will be a point where you feel the electricity slightly, lower ot more and there is the shock. The most hurtful thing would piercing a wire through the skin, because then the skin resistance is gone.
Aside from contact resistance it could also be that the bath the current took through your body was good (so more on the surface, not across the heart, but down one side of the body and so on).
That being said, your description of the shock does not sound like a fully fledged 230V 50Hz shock to me (certified electical engineer). In my experience you will definitely notice it right away, e.g. because you suddenly just see black and a sharp pain including with extreme vibrations that feel like pure energy is hitting you with a brick in the face. Feeling the vibration like you described it and then making the decision to let go sounds like only a very small current was flowing.
Can you point to any source for this? I have not been able to find any report of someone suddenly dying from cardiac problems days after an electric shock. It sounds kinda plausible, but I wonder if it is an urban legend.
People lose limbs or die from severe electric burns, and people can die from cardiac arrest immediately after being shocked, but are there really cases where people have cardiac arrest days after an electric shock?
I've heard this idea before, that you can die hours or days after an electric shock without realizing anything is wrong, but I think it is very rare.
An electrical injury can certainly trigger an abnormal heart rhythm, but you would probably notice most of those and, hopefully, go get a cardiogram.
If you felt normal, but had a serious electrical injury to the heart that would later lead to fibrillation, one would have to postulate some sort of abnormal re-entrant (sort-of circular) depolarization current in the heart muscle that was very regular, say 60 beats per minute, but that was prone to deteriorate into fibrillation over time.
That is what I recall about the matter, off the top of my head.
Your heart is triggered by weak electrical impulses and what we learned is that these impulses are surprisingly resistant against outside interference, but there is a threshold at which this is not the case anymore. It certainly won't beat 50 times a second (or 60 times for the 60 Hz people), but it will get a signal to do so 50 times a second.
What we learned further was that electrical incidents have high variability, some people can die by just touching the wrong wire, some survive lightning strikes twice. A true gamble.
I cannot point you at more resources here, all my resources we had are A) German and B) fall under stupid copy right regulations which I think are a crime when we are talking about any kind of norm. "Hey these are the rules you have to adhere to! Just keep in mind to pay us a few grand a year to get the up to date version"
Do they use 230V in Portugal?
In NZ I'd never seen a pull cord until I moved to the UK. All of our electrics in bathrooms are certified for use around water there, including proper breakers/multiple RCDs etc.
I think modernised UK homes that are now up to date often forgo the pull cords.
Just a moment of shock, then pain, followed by lots of cursing and then gratitude it wasn't worse.
From an engineer here, let's not continue this dangerous trope.
High voltage breaks down resistance and allows current to flow. Current can only flow in the presence of voltage.
Proof:
A 1V 1000A power supply won't kill any one and won't give a shock. A 2000V .001A power supply might give quite a shock on the other hand, and depending upon any capacitance in the supply might just as well prove fatal.
It very well could if the frequency is high enough. The skin is like a capacitor which acts like a short circuit at high frequency. DC is much less dangerous than AC at the same current/voltage for this reason.
What does the capacitor supply, that the PSU can't? Could it be discharge current?
Before you accuse me of repeating dangerous tropes, please consider making sure to discuss it with the folks at VDE, because this is what it says in their (and the equivalent european) product norms and norms for electrical installations.
When touching the positive pole of a 1V 1000A PSU (I assume DC) you won't have 1000A flowing through your body. It is not the rating current of the PSU that kills you, but the actual current going through your body. And how well that current will flow through your body depends on many things, including voltage, frequency (if we are talking AC), contact resistances, skin resistance, the internal resistance of your body, how big you are, your ground connection resistance, the duration of the current flow, etc.
There is a reason we use high AC voltage for transportation of currents for long distances.
All else equal, twice the voltage yields twice the current (and 4x the power).
So while yes, it's the current that kills you, in the majority of circumstances high voltage = high current. Outside of explicitly current-limited setups (e.g. a Van de Graaff generator or a desktop ionizer), most higher voltage devices will kill you more easily.
And so the "voltage doesn't kill" meme more often than not (IMO) gives laymen an undue sense of safety when working with higher voltages, at the benefit of appealing to the more electrically-inclined crowds sense of "being precisely correct".
Just look at the dozens deaths a year from people messing with microwave transformers, trying to make some pretty wood lightning art, for an example of this.
To be debated. Most of the visible (air-arcing) shocks I tend to get happen when I wear the wrong textile and given the length of the arc the voltage is well above 1 kV. So in most of the circumstances I personally encounter the current did not kill me.
What kills you is the current flow through your body. Voltage and frequency helps to produce that flow. RCDs and other protective devices help to limit that flow.
High voltage is dangerous if it has the current to back it. High voltage is also dangerous in the hands of people who don't understand the difference between current and voltage.
I = V/R
It's as simple as that. A high enough voltage will find a current path ionizing the air or whatever is in it's way. A high current doesn't doesn't do that by itself.
That's why you see warning signs for "HIGH VOLTAGE" but not "HIGH CURRENT".
I assume that's because it doesn't form a complete circuit with the electrical substation your power is coming from -- though some power is delivered, perhaps does due to capacitance between the ground and the distribution lines.
Note it would be completely different if your power service used single-wire earth return (SWER)[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return
Years ago, I heard of someone feeding their pets cooked, bone-in chicken. Eating cooked chicken bones is very dangerous, but you can do it for years before that one day that it suddenly isn't safe.
Why is that?
> If anyone would like to explain why that didn't kill me I'm all ears.
I once got jolted while grabbing an electric transformer. I've researched this a bit, but I'm not a doctor so take my hypothesizing here with a grain of salt:
From what I've read, it seems like most deaths are caused by 1) disruption of the human body's electrical systems or 2) severe burns where electricity enters/exits the body.
It's a bit unclear to me what exactly causes burns--it seems that arcs, especially longer, sustained arcs, are related, but not necessarily. This seems to happen more with high-current situations. If you didn't experience burns, it's probably because the current wasn't high enough to cause that.
The more common thing seems to be disruption of the body's electrical systems, which can occur with much weaker currents than cause burns. The most common thing seems to be that electricity across the heart can disrupt the nerves that regulate heartbeat, but electricity across blood vessels can also cause constriction that causes stroke, and electricity across the brain can cause seizures, disruption of breathing/pulse, etc. It really does seem like the vast majority of deaths are caused by electricity across the heart though. If you don't see cardiac symptoms shortly after a shock, you're unlikely to see them, which is probably because the electricity didn't primarily go across your heart.
I'm not sure what the configuration of your grabbing this light fixture was, but a right-handed person grabbing a light fixture with their right hand, would likely see a current traveling through their right arm and then down through their right leg and, to a lesser extent, through their left leg, to the floor (once the current hits your torso there's more "bandwidth" on the way to the floor and the current spreads out more which is why you experienced "vibrating" in your hand and arm, but not your torso). This path doesn't take the current over your heart or any of the parts of the brain that regulate heartbeat or breathing, so that's my best guess as to why you didn't die.
There are several mountains in North America, Central America, South America, Spain, the Philippines, and probably other countries w/ Spanish language influence named "the Sierra <something>s" or "the <something> Sierras".
WTF, even without the additional "challenges" of Yellowstone Lake.. I neither would nor could imagine go swimming then :o
Please don't fuck with nature for fun. It's all great memories, but one of 100 of you will die and someone else has to find your body and clean up your mess.
Where it gets tricky, in my opinion is:
- we aren't convinced the person is currently capable of making rational decisions
- we aren't convinced the person is fully informed and equipped with an intimate understanding of the risk they're undertaking
I think both of these cases are about wanting what's best for the individual, but struggling with the balance of support vs. control.
https://xkcd.com/795/
It’s also evident in her story about getting caught by the river. She thought, I’m not going to do anything crazy like those climbers- and then did something that seemed innocent but was actually far more dangerous.
Simply saying it's so dangerous that one of you should die this summer should be sufficient for someone to then do their own research and take precautions given that the total risks of the area can't be covered.
But everyone I encountered in risk sports knew the difference between "smart crazy" vs "dumb crazy".
It is the difference between using knowledge, skill, technology, and mental focus to reduce risk to manageable levels, vs "getting away with it".
Getting away with it, riding on PDL — Pure Dumb Luck — can work for a long time. Until it doesn't, and you're dead. Like those YouTube idiots in the article. Getting away with it is just Russian Roulette with a different name and method.
Yet by using knowledge, skill, technology, and mental focus, people can live entire careers in situations that would reliably kill us in seconds, everythign from mountaineering, deep underwater, aviation, space, racecar driving, and more. Understand the risks, the skills to avoid them, the technology to minimize them, and pay attention, and you'll likely be rewarded with a lifetime of risky and rewarding adventures.
Read the books, take the lessons, get some good coaching and apprenticing, and don't cheap out on good gear (as they say, if you've got only a $10 head, then fine, get a $10 helmet, otherwise...). Also, listen to your body and the surroundings. If the conditions or your body is off, you don't have to TODAY climb that route, do that dive, whatever; you can do it or another one tomorrow.
It is no less joy to be wise about it!
If you get hurt as a kid in a lower stakes fashion, you start to learn that breaking the rules hurts. That opportunity for lower stakes learning might be shrinking as we legislate away some "risky" stuff.
Some people simply can't handle the "constraints" of being responsible... like my wife. Her favorite quote is "I just want to live life". No thoughts to "what if?" or being prepared. If some stranger held the same beliefs and died, I still wouldn't feel bad - that's the way they chose to live thier life.
Yup, humans are generally awful at understanding and managing risk, and it is in no small part because there is almost anti-training about risk outside of high-risk activities, and even some of those are very low on guidance and high on PDL.
>> I still wouldn't feel bad - that's the way they chose to live thier life.
True, 'tho I feel like it is my better to not die soon-ish doing what I love, but enjoy many decades of doing what I love; doing it a little smarter and sometimes not quite at Warp-9 every second, so I can do more Warp-9 seconds later.
I used to be an alpine ski racer, downhill my best event. At one national championship, the lower half of the race course was pretty flat and the race organizers decided to spice up one of the drop-offs with a bigger jump, building an illegal ramp before the drop-off (the FIS rules for Downhill stated that features cannot be sloped up before the racers leave the ground, level or down-slope only). I decided I had the knowledge I needed without pushing it on that feature in training so shed some speed every training run. For the several days of training runs before the race, every afternoon we were visiting friends in the hospital with fairly serious injuries from that feature (one back injury never raced again and never fully recovered). By race day, they'd decided to make it legal and shaved off the ramp. I have never felt that I missed out on anything by being aggressive on the top and skipping the Warp-9 attitude there...
Normal humans are normal at understanding and managing risk because normal is defined by typical human behavior.
It is your expectations that deviate from the norm.
(the above applies to pretty much all "people suck" type gripes)
While I've been very fortunate to have been able to pursue and get training in a variety of activities considered high-risk, I'm amazed at how often it applies to ordinary situations. Plus, an awful lot of ordinary life is much higher-risk than people think.
We don't need extensive experience in sports or motorsports to understand that the difference between wearing a helmet or not in even a stupid little fall where your head hits something hard is the difference between "damn, I scratched my helmet" and your family organizing your funeral. This applies to everyone, and yet it is only this generation that is normalizing wearing helmets on bicycles, etc., and people still vociferously fight motorcycle helmet laws despite mountains of statistics of higher severe injury and death rates among non-helmeted motorcyclists vs. people who wear gear.
While it is ordinary for most people to not only not understand epidemiology and statistics, a significant portion also willfully ignore the advice of those who do. Just because this significant portion exists, should we no longer expect people to either understand something or at least respect those who do?
Most particularly, humans are obviously capable of understanding the difference between getting away with relying on Pure Dumb Luck vs applying knowledge, skill, technology, and attention to managing risk.
Yet, just as obviously, MOST people haven't got a clue and consistently engage in foolish risks, and get injured or dead as a result, whether we're talking about YouTube idiots, people going to COVID parties, or in massive drinking binges, and nevermind understanding anything about engineering risk building bridges, aircraft, or whatever.
It seems an obvious line to draw at understanding risk between using skill/knowledge/tech/attention vs using Pure Dumb Luck that the latter suck at risk management, and objectively most people are in the latter group. Moreover, I'd say more people are in this latter group, and the consequences are more serious, than in other fields, such as saying "most people suck at proper grammar".
What am I missing?
Look at people like Ayrton Senna. Died doing what he loved, but he didn't have to, and the changes that his death inspired made F1 racing much safer without sacrificing the hair-raising speed. He also probably would have lived if the sport's governing body had learned from a prior serious crash on the ultimately fatal corner.
Personally, I still feel bad about deaths like that.
The solutions implemented where only discovered/developed because of the crash. We can go back in time and see how many people would have been saved by seatbelts and airbags. I would guess there are additional future safety stuff that future people could look back on us the same way. It's just reality and I don't feel bad about that.
How many people have road flares in their car? Or blankets? Or some sort of emergency heat source? These things don't take up much space, are cheap to acquire, and easy to maintain. They can save your life or someone else's.
Any automobile with adequate fuel is a fine source of heat. As long as you're not parked inside.
Turns out I had set up my tent on a barely-visible trail that they were probably accustomed to using to get up and down the slope. I don't know if I was really in any danger, but I gained more respect for moose after that.
Ironically, I'd spent the entire hike that day worrying about a bear encounter, but the only time I saw a bear was from long distance, across the valley, a mother and her cub.
On my first trip there, when I was hiking with my family on the Iceberg Lake trail, a couple appeared running back towards us with their bear spray pointed behind them. We were at first concerned that they were running from a bear, but a few moments later, a moose appeared behind them trotting down the trail. We turned around and booked it back down the trail until we found a spot where we could get off the trail behind some trees, and the moose ended up turning off.
That was quite a scare at the time, and it could have ended very poorly, but it makes for a great story now.
The rules and reasoning seem weak. Rule #1 (be prepared) seems fine. Rule #2 (be respectful) Seems to blur the distinction between respecting the danger and respecting your impact on the environment. You should of course do the latter, but not because you will be less likely to get hurt. Rule #3 (trust the statistics) I don't know what they're trying to get at, if there were fewer than 8 deaths per 10 million visits that would imply that it's a safe activity. They completely incorrectly say that the majority of deaths are men aged 55-64, when in fact that's just the largest group (we assume, the original report treats gender and age separately, but only 19% of deaths are in that age group). Even the source page mislabels the graph for this one.
Overall I just would have rewritten or cut out the end. It was what I thought was an interesting discussion on human actions but then it turned into something prescriptive with weak reasoning.
The statistics the article draws from: https://www.psbr.law/nevada/deaths-in-us-national-parks/
Ended up having to sleep in the car, and even that really wasn't enough to stay warm without having to turn the car on every few hours. Roads were frozen and impassable so if anything had really gone south, we'd have been screwed.
Since then we obviously educated ourselves a lot and improved our winter camping gear and now we actively seek out cold weather camping.
You can see some photos here: https://roambyland.com/colorado-winters-sawpit-telluride-gun...
(1) always know the risks you are getting into - while she was an experienced outdoorsperson, the author clearly had little to know awareness of the dangers of moving water.
(2) statistically, things happen outside your control - and our natural response is to pretend it can't happen to us because we follow the rules, but that's not true. Sometimes lightning hits you, or the drunk driver slams into your car, or your foot slips in a place where there's no margin for error.
To me, (2) is the more important point, and can be lost in the harrowing story that she uses to make point (1). You can do everything right, whether that is in the outdoors or driving on a highway, and still become a fatality. When we pretend it couldn't happen to us, because we are better prepared, respect the environment, etc, we are kidding ourselves.
The outdoors may bring this into starker focus because the margin for error is lower, but the point applies throughout our lives.
Someone doing something dumb, going where they shouldn't, taking something, saying something, posting something.
The majority loose out because of the selfishness of the few.
He was a journalist who lived in New York, it was winter and well below freezing for weeks and he'd acclimatized, but he agreed to go for a walk with a friend in Uganda. So he flew there overnight, landed, went out drinking and catching up, then headed off on a walk along the Nile in 100F+ weather. They were fairly well prepared, had emergency satelite communication etc. First few days were fine, but then they headed off the road. Only a few miles, then over the course of an hour he went from needing a short break, to being delirious, struggled to drink, then finally passed out. The rescue helicopter they had the coverage for didn't get there in time - literally two hours from "can we pause a minute" to "he's dead".
Power was an experienced traveller, on a decent expedition, with good support. Not a flip-flop wearing tourist you find up half way up a mountain with no map and a twisted ankle. A walk for a few miles from a road in 30C sun is the kind of thing you may think will end up with some sunburn if you forget to wear a hat, not something that will kill a 39 year old before a helicopter can reach him.