And part 2: as soon as the electrical current is removed, does the water become immediately safe to touch again?
In: Chemistry
Nothing. It’s electricity that’s harmful, not water.
As for why getting in that water is dangerous, well… water is a bad conductor of electricity. And electricity likes to follow the most convenient path through things. So if you purify water, it won’t conduct electricity well. But if you dissolve conductive minerals or other impurities into the water, it might become a better conductor, because the electricity will follow a path through those *other* substances.
So if electricity tends to follow the most convenient path, and a human hops in, the only question is whether that human is a more convenient path than the water. And we are.
Water in itself cannot conduct electricity, its the impurities inside of the water that does. Minerals like iron and zinc. The water from your tap contains a lot of minerals that can conduct electricity.
Now for electricity to actually be conducted, there needs to be a difference in charge. Thats why there is a plus and minus side in your batteries. The negatively charged electrons are stored on the minus side, and want to get to the positively charged ions on the other. But they cant, because there is no “road” for them to get there. When you plug the battery into something though, its like you are giving it an highway. Now the plus and minus sides are connected through whatever device they are in. The electrons will start moving, and as they do, the device will recieve energy from it.
However, if you give it a shorter way to take, it will want to take that way instead. This is called short-circuiting. Basically what you are doing, is cutting a shortcut on that highway. You do this by adding somethint else that can connect the plus and minus sides. Like spilling water, the electricity will now take the water path instead since its shorter. And you most likely ruined the device.
If you conduct electricity through water, there is now a large electrical charge there compared to your own body. So when you jump in the charge wants to even out, and it will transfer energy into your body so that your body will get the same charge as the water. And you will very possibly die a horrific death.
If your body and the water has the same charge though, nothing should happen. This is why you sometimes shock yourself on static electricity. If you are sitting in a sofa static charge may build up slowly on you, but it will remain the same charge as the sofa. So when you go up and touch a door, the handle in the door has a different charge and it will want to even out. So you get a shock.
Electricity passing through water doesn’t make the water itself harmful, it is the electricity that is the danger. Our bodies use charge gradients between cells to transfer signals through nerves, and electricity is a massive charge gradient. The result is that when electricity passes through the human body it triggers all kinds of signals at once; muscles contract all at once without stopping, senses go haywire, etc. This can be extremely dangerous for things that we need to operate constantly, such as our heart.
Beyond that, electricity experiences resistance in all substances (except superconductors) and that resistance results in heat. Sufficient electricity passing through the body can produce enough heat to damage tissue through actually cooking it, denaturing proteins and chemically altering it permanently. Essentially it is a penetrating burn wherever the path of electricity flowed.
So electricity has the potential to be really bad for the human body, but why is it so dangerous with water? This is because normally electricity is confined to things like wires, and as long as you don’t touch a hot wire you should be good. Water can conduct electricity though (technically it needs some trace salts or similar ions to be a good conductor, but that is usually the case unless it is highly distilled water). This turns a dangerous wire into a pool of dangerous fluid that covers a much larger area and can flow around in unexpected ways. It is also often not obvious the electrified water is dangerous since it just looks like normal water, but touching it could result in lethal path for electricity to move to ground though your body.
And yes, if the electricity is removed then the water is immediately safe to touch (as long as it isn’t hot). Think about if you cut the electricity to a wire, the wire is immediately safe to touch because it wasn’t somehow altered into a harmful material while it was conducting electricity.
Not an expert or chemist of sorts, but I do know that water itself does not conduct – it’s for example the dissolved salts and the metals in the water that makes it conduct electricity. Distilled water without impurities in it does not conduct electricity. As for what actually happens to the molecules; I can’t answer this.
Electricity is dangerous to humans when human bodies are a part of the electrical circuit. If an area of high voltage finds a path to ground through a human body, that human will be hurt by the electricity.
Water that is electrified can be dangerous because water conducts electricity better then air. Say you have a puddle of water on a rubber floor. On one end of the puddle, there’s a wire with high voltage, on the other end of the puddle is a human touching the ground and the puddle.
The electricity flows from the wire through the water, through the human, to the ground. Human gets hurt in the process.
After the cable is removed, for a brief less than a nanosecond. That electricity still flows to ground trying to reach equilibrium. Once it does reach equilibrium it stops flowing.
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