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Darwin award goes to Texas girl fried in bathtub by her cell phone
July 12, 2017 at
04:54 AM
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USA TODAY
Unplug it STUPID!
A 14-year-old girl from Lubbock, Texas, died Sunday after being electrocuted in a bathtub while using her cell phone, according to local reports.
Madison Coe was electrocuted after she either grabbed her phone that was plugged in or plugged in her phone, her grandmother Donna O'Guinn told KCBD-TV. The teen was visiting her father in New Mexico when the incident occurred.
"There was a burn mark on her hand, the hand that would have grabbed the phone. And that was just very obvious that that's what had happened," O'Guinn told the news station.
https://www.usatoday.co
A 14-year-old girl from Lubbock, Texas, died Sunday after being electrocuted in a bathtub while using her cell phone, according to local reports.
Madison Coe was electrocuted after she either grabbed her phone that was plugged in or plugged in her phone, her grandmother Donna O'Guinn told KCBD-TV. The teen was visiting her father in New Mexico when the incident occurred.
"There was a burn mark on her hand, the hand that would have grabbed the phone. And that was just very obvious that that's what had happened," O'Guinn told the news station.
https://www.usatoday.co
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The typical wall outlet is 1 phase so it's 120V, not 240V. 110V/220V wasn't used since the 1920s, and people still remember those numbers for some reason. It was stepped up multiple times, and since the 80s the "standard" has been ~120V.
Unless she's charging a stove, a welder, an AC or an electric car in her bath tub, she's not using 2-phase power of "220V" (technically 240V).
And now to address your point, she had an extension cord. You don't know which part of the extension cord fell into the water (the tip where the phone is and has 5VDC, or the part where the transformed is inside the phone charger that connects to 120V AC). The real question should be why didn't the GFCI stop it, and the answer could be some older houses weren't built with GFCI's (the code only started requiring them past the 1970s).
http://www.mirror.co.u
It's the amps that kills and how much amps drawn is limited by the volts.
There's really very little information here other than that she has burn mark on her arm.
Nah I was thinking of this post.
At any rate, I've been bitten by 120V plenty of times. Granted I wasn't in a bathtub full of water.
Regardless, I'm just doing some VERY BASIC science here. Most people should know off the top of their heads that nearly every cell phone charges on USB voltage (5VDC) and there are 2 charging standards - ~ 1 and ~ 2 A. Apparently applying V=IR is too difficult for journalists these days, but clearly the intent here was to get clicks from morons that think their cell phone could electrocute them. That's VERY FAR from being in the tub and reaching over to PLUG IN your phone to 120V.
Also, if you can lick a 9V battery and feel it, you should be able to feel 5mA.
Here's a good summary of what current level will kill you
5 - 10 mA Pain
10 - 20 mA Involuntary muscle contractions
20 - 100 mA Paralysis, heart stoppage
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A phone's battery, while having a lot of juice, is not going to electrocute someone, at least to the point of them dying. Blowing up? Catching on fire? Sure.
A typical phone charger is what? 5V @ 1A? That isn't going to kill someone either. Maybe if you stick it in your mouth you could get a jolt like a 9v battery. Maybe.
I guess the charger could have been grossly defective, but that's unlikely. One report I read said it was plugged into an extension cord. Now if she dropped THAT into the water, sure, she could easily get fried badly. But that would apply to anything she had plugged into it, making the whole "death by cell phone" completely irrelevant outside of misleading sensationalized news story titles. It's like the story of the idiot who almost died because he slept with his cell phone, but only because his dog tag necklace touched the exposed extension cord (seems to be a pattern here...). In the end, people who are stupid will find a way to kill themselves one way or another.
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Also, if you can lick a 9V battery and feel it, you should be able to feel 5mA.
Here's a good summary of what current level will kill you
V=IR
If I is important, then with a given V, we need to know R.
If R ~ 1000 ohms and V=5 then I ~ 0.005 A = 5mA
Or simply put a phone charger's electrical output isn't going to kill you