You wanted more stories, I’ve got more stories.

Pre-text: I am an engineer who services and supports industrial furnaces. Foundries use our products to melt, transport, hold, and pour iron and aluminum. As a result, I work with a lot of maintenance personnel and machine operators.

I get a call from a client. He informs me that while walking through the vault he saw a wet spot on the concrete below one of his capacitor cabinets. I tell him he probably has a small leak. The unit runs and so it’s not an emergency, but I tell him he should fix it after production ends. I also tell him he should wait 15 minutes at least after the unit turns off before touching anything to let the capacitors dissipate the energy. I don’t hear back from him, so I assume everything’s ok and go on my way.

3 months later, I get sent to this location for a PM visit. I catch up with him and ask him if he fixed the leak. He replies, “Well funny story about that...

So we turned off the unit shortly after and one of the middle capacitors had a small leak, just like you said from the water hose. I could see it dripping down the bus plate and onto the other connection points.

So I was waiting and I guess it was a couple minutes when I figured I’d check the temperature of the water cooling. I figure, water is not conductive, it’s ok to touch right?”

I smile a chuckle. He’s not completely wrong. Our water cooling system has a conductivity monitor that is supposed to make sure the conductivity of the water is below 60 uS. But even then it’s just reduced, as completely nonconductive water is theoretically impossible and extremely not conductive (below 20 uS) would eat away at the metal piping a lot faster.

“Anyways, I put my hand under the plate to catch a drop and right as it’s about to fall, I see a flash and I’m on my ass. My hand hurts. My back and leg hurts. I had a burn on my finger.

“I bandage myself up and wait the 15 minutes like you said. Then tighten the hose. So it hasn’t leaked since.

“But here’s the funny part. I get home late and I swear this is true. I walk past my TV and it turns on. Confused, I walk back across the room. It turned off. I go and wake up my wife. I show her and she laughs. For the next week, my tv would randomly turn on and off as I walked past it. “

We both laugh. How he was alive, I have no idea. If the TV thing was true, I have no idea. But I did find during my PM that the conductivity monitor had a bad power supply, and that the valve to the deionizer tank was a NC valve. Meaning for an unknown amount of time the conductivity of the water has not been monitored.

When they finally replaced the monitor, the meter read 1500uS.

Edit: Due to a lot of questions, an explanation of uS. It is the measurement of conductivity also called Mhos. It is the basically 1 uS = 1/ 1Mohms. It is measured standardly as uS per cm at 90 degrees F. Essentially, the water is supposed to act as a huge resistor before he touched. Instead it was significantly less resistant.