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?
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E. Eng. here (practicing engineer, also studying for my Graduate degree). Misleading answers all over the place, here are some clarifications:
– water on your skin greatly increases your shock hazard (reduces your contact resistance) *when you are directly in contact with an electrical source*. If sitting in a large body of water, but nowhere near the electrical source, no immediate danger
– a large body of water has a proportionally large resistance. Current will flow through it and dissipate as heat. As others have mentioned, this is similar to a grounding system, where fault currents are intentionally diverted to the ground (actual earth ground, at one point) to safely dissipate the energy
– non fault currents to not have significant enough energy to propogate through large bodies of water and shock a human standing in it
– large bodies of water may not even trip a circuit. As mentioned above, large bodies of water will have a reasonably high resistance, thereby limiting the current
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