Electrocution and Electrical Injury Claims

Three different injuries, often confused

Electric shock is current passing through the body, which can disrupt heart rhythm, cause involuntary muscle contraction preventing release from the source, and damage nerve and muscle tissue along its path.

Electrocution properly describes a fatal electrical injury, though the word is used more loosely in ordinary speech.

An arc flash is different again: an electrical fault ionising the air, producing extreme heat, intense light and a pressure wave, and causing severe burns without the person necessarily contacting a conductor at all. It requires separately certified protective clothing — see burn and explosion injuries.

Why low voltage is not low risk

What harms the body is current, not voltage alone, and the current that flows depends on the resistance of the path it takes. Dry, intact skin offers substantial resistance. Wet skin, sweat, or contact through a cut offers far less — and the current rises accordingly.

The practical consequence is that ordinary industrial and domestic voltages are capable of causing cardiac arrest under realistic working conditions. Injuries at those levels are routinely under-treated because everyone present assumes low voltage means low consequence, and the person is sent back to work rather than to hospital.

The path the current took through the body matters more than the voltage. Hand-to-hand or hand-to-foot paths cross the chest; a contact that does not is often less serious at the same voltage.

The damage you cannot see

Entry and exit wounds can be small and unremarkable while the tissue between them has sustained significant injury. Current passing through the body damages muscle and nerve along its route, and deep burns can occur with almost nothing visible on the surface.

Two consequences follow. Cardiac monitoring is warranted after a significant electrical contact even where the person feels well, because rhythm disturbances can develop some hours later. And where substantial muscle has been damaged, the same complications that follow crush injuries — including acute kidney injury from muscle breakdown products — become a risk.

For a claim, this is why the initial medical record so often understates the injury, and why a settlement offered against that record understates it too.

How electrical injuries happen at work

• Working on equipment believed to be de-energised, where isolation was never verified by testing.
• Lockout-tagout applied incompletely, or removed by someone other than the person who applied it.
• Contact with overhead power lines by cranes, aerial lifts, scaffolding or long-handled tools.
• Damaged, improvised or unsuitable temporary power and extension leads.
• Missing or non-functioning ground-fault protection, particularly in wet locations.
• Arc flash during switching, racking of breakers, or work inside energised panels.
• Contact with buried services during excavation.
• Equipment lacking adequate protective devices, or with protection that had been bypassed.

Energised work, and the permit that should exist

The governing principle in NFPA 70E is that electrical work is done de-energised. Working live is permitted only where de-energising would introduce a greater hazard or is genuinely infeasible — not because it is quicker, and not because a shutdown is inconvenient.

Where live work is justified, an energised electrical work permit documents that justification, the hazard and risk analysis, the approach boundaries, and the protective equipment required. Its absence is frequently decisive: if no permit exists for work performed live, the question becomes why the equipment was not simply switched off.

Where an OSHA inspection follows, the citation record and inspection file become available to a civil claim — see OSHA violations in workplace claims.

Who is liable for an electrical injury at work?

Commonly a party other than your employer, which matters because workers' compensation blocks a claim against the employer and none of the others.

Depending on the circumstances: the site operator controlling the area and its energy isolation, a maintenance or electrical contractor whose work created the hazard, the manufacturer of equipment that failed or lacked adequate protective devices, the utility where overhead lines were involved, and the maker of arc-rated clothing that underperformed its rating. See third-party work injury claims and defective equipment claims.

The long tail

Electrical injuries have well-documented longer-term effects that frequently appear after the acute injury has healed: peripheral nerve damage with chronic pain or numbness, muscle weakness, difficulties with memory and concentration, sleep disturbance, and post-traumatic symptoms. Because these emerge late, an electrical claim resolved quickly is often resolved for a fraction of its eventual cost — see catastrophic injury claims.