b.shavir. I'm not sure you understand the mechanics going on here...
Pee is not a stream, rain is not a stream, they are individual droplets seperated by LARGE distances of empty space. There is no conduction path. You could drop a bucket full of pure copper beads and the same thing would occur, absolutely nothing. Each individual air gap adds with the distance between the source of the voltage and the destination so either the voltage would have to be absolutely massively high (high tension wires) or the distance would have to be already extremely short. If you could fill 50% of the space between an HV conductor and a discharge point you would only double the distance you could get shocked from.

Look at the typical water flow from a small hose over any distance greater than about 6 inches and you'll see that there is no conduction path, just water droplets traveling in a common path.

 

I thought about making a similar post, the ratio of rain to air is very low even in the worst rain. How can it be otherwise?

 

As a matter of fact, the 'Related' link in blue (Elma man was electrocuted thru hand, not urine) adjacent to the article indicates the man died due to electrocution thru hand & not urine as earlier suspected!

Good to know.

 

Regarding the story about water: pure water is not conductive, it is the impurities in water that makes it conductive in some cases. Rain water contains very little impurities per drop, my recollection says that a particle (dust) of less than 1% of a rain drop's volume is enough to form a rain drop. So rain water is very close to absolute water and therefore non conductive.

 

rvh002, I'm sorry but that's not factual at all. Even pure distilled water will conduct some electricity, it's just not very good at it. From what I can find at this website
http://stream-team.org/Parameters/conductb.html
The conductance of melted snow flakes is in the neighborhood of 25ohms per centimeter (they don't list a metric but centimeter is common) Rainwater should be approximately equivalent, and the conductance rises with any dissolved substances, such as whatever dust might be on the dielectric spacers of a high voltage line increasing it's conductivity.

Absolutely pure water is something like 18megohms per cm but absolutely pure water like that doesn't exist outside of a lab. The earths atmosphere is a very dirty dusty place and there is plenty of time from the possible miles long drop through the atmosphere for the water to pick up all sorts of things, like oxygen carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, soot, dust, pretty much anything that's on the wind.

What prevents the electrocution with rain has already been stated several times, it's that the bulk of the space even during the hardest downpour is a tiny fraction of the total space. It could be said pretty accurately that aside from increased humidity, in free air the rain doesn't drastically affect airs conductivity. Might increase capacitance quiet a bit though, but since the rain is constantly falling it would be very odd.

 

Although drops of water can be considered as beads of copper falling in a straight line, one cannot neglect the effects of 'surface tension' of water. The surface tension would fuse water drops together to form a continuous stream.

One could consider beads of copper fusing together to form a continuous stream of liquid copper. Water drops might act like beads in space i.e. under 'zero' gravity conditions.

 

b. shahvir sorry but that doesn't occur, surface tension has absolutly nothing whatsoever to do with attracting water droplets into a stream once they're the size of approximatly a rain drop unless the turbulance is incredibly low, and that does not occur in the real world under any circumstances I'm aware of, once a stream of water separates into beads it won't rejoin into a laminar stream again by any natural means.

You could use liquid copper beads as an example and the exact same thing would occur if they were falling like rain. The total conductance would only increase by the percentage of copper beads to volume of space.

 

Although drops of water can be considered as beads of copper falling in a straight line, one cannot neglect the effects of 'surface tension' of water. The surface tension would fuse water drops together to form a continuous stream.

One could consider beads of copper fusing together to form a continuous stream of liquid copper. Water drops might act like beads in space i.e. under 'zero' gravity conditions.

Actually, the surface tension plays a large part in the formation of the droplets.

 

In the formation of the droplets yes, but absolutely none in the formation of a stream from droplets which in the real world can not occur spontaneously, it defies entropy in a chaotic system.