There has been so much flooding recently, and Im just wondering about how if a house floods, or any other building floods, how are people even able to stand in that water and not be electrocuted?
Aren’t plugs and outlets and such covered in water and therefore making that a really big possibility?
In: 11434
Electricity has a place that it starts from, and a place that it wants to get back to (the hot prong and the neutral prong of an outlet, for example).
Whenever it sees a conductive path that goes where it wants to go, it moves along that. The more conductive the path, the more electricity moves. If there are multiple paths, the electricity divides itself up proportionate to how easy/conductive the various paths are. You’re only in trouble if your body is a significant part of an easy path (or, by degrees, if there is a lot of electricity). In a massive lake, you’re relatively unimportant. There are plenty of better paths for the electricity to take.
EDIT: good chance the breaker has already tripped by the time a massive lake is involved anyway.
EDIT EDIT: this is the same principle that explains why a bird can sit on a bare high-voltage wire and not get electrocuted.
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