I keep seeing videos of people coming home to a burst pipe or the neighbors above them having a flood. The water pours down from the ceiling and from the light fixtures (lights are on), but the people walking around the house don’t get electrocuted.
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Water isn’t nearly as good a conductor as movies and TV makes it seem, it also doesn’t just “electrify all the water” and then zap you for touching it like you might see in media.
In short electricity won’t just “fill the water”, electricity wants to *go somewhere*. So for example if you have a flooded room with something like a high-voltage wire in it, that electricity will either want to stay in the wire, or leave the wire and flow somewhere, like into a near by metal sewer pipe that can send the electricity to the ground. In this case the electricity would be traveling through the water like lighting through the air. Just because there is lightning outside, it’s like being outside in the air just fries you instantly, *you need to get hit by the lighting*. And that’s why walking around in a field or touching metal objects during a storm can be dangerous, because the lighting can decide it *does* want to travel through you.
IT IS STILL DANGEROUS though because if you enter the water *you can become* that path for the electricity (like standing outside on a flat field holding a metal rod during a thunderstorm). For example if you enter the water and then *you* touch the metal sewer pipe now you’re part of the path from wire to water to sewer pipe and that’s muy no bueno for you.
In the videos you see people are either desperate or idiots. You absolutely should not end water that has the potential of being electrified.
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