It was rather more serious than that.

Kington Horse Show organiser fined over electrocution - BBC News

so the area of contact of the bottom of the tyre with the ground may well be much larger than anticipated. Or much less if it has been overfilled and has no air in it at all, water being almost in-compressible, but 1000 times denser than air, as in round numbers the molecules in water are ten times closer together.

 I have a colleague at work who narrowly avoided injury when removing  a wheel that turned out to be mostly water filled.

Mike

our HV trips are set at 10-20A so its not exactly an RCD like protection but does not require anything more than a few hundred ohms to operate the trip, so the HV earthing requirements to detect a line down are not perfect, but if it lands in mud or faults to the HV earth at a pole pig transformer, it is likely to work quite well.

Mike.

You do not need much insulation to hold off 6 to 7kV RMS, in dry conditions a few mm of polyethylene will do. (there are cables that put 50kV DC between the inner and outer of URM67 without issue, except at the ends where the connection needs to be re-entrant by 2-3 inches) The problem with anything outdoors  is the tracking over a surface with dust, or mud and a little moisture leading to local heating and a far longer fault path is needed to avoid this.
And given the higher voltage means the current that flows via  boot leather, clothing,  etc is enough to do serious injury, (as well as set fire to the boots with your feet in them).

Hence the shiny and ribbed water shedding shapes on insulators, and even then you sometimes see flashover when there is a cloud of pollen or a dust storm in just the wrong place. (its not unknown for lines to trip near where there has been dust from explosive demolition, especially of chimneys and so on where the dust is sooty and partly conducting.)

Insulating the wires of the 11kV and 33kV  networks has been considered, and is already done in high risk places, but is far from universal, and not without problems of its own, damaged insulation can trap water and the wire rots, and again, current tracking over the insulation surface may cause heating damage.

Mike

This is an impressive example. About 30 seconds in cooling towers are dropped at Didcot, Some debris flies off at the time, and then at 2mins  10 or so, the dust cloud gets to the 33kV lines, and it sizzles for the full 5 seconds before the earth fault relay does it's thing.

The sun of course gets the prize for best photo and  poor write up

ADS  is not the same protection level at HV as at 230V. Long disconnection time translates into a lot of damage.

Mike,

I was out walking yesterday evening and came across this in one of the farmers fields 

The lines on the far right are the lines above the mainline train tracks. They were all getting a good wash by the looks of it! 

More on water.

In the table  below "442 solution" contain the following salts diluted in pure water: 40% sodium bicarbonate, 40% sodium sulphate and 20% sodium chloride. These represent the main conductive ions that are in typical surface and ground water. A purely sodium chloride solution is probably more representative of brackish or sea water.

Converting to a single % 'TDS' total dissolved solids from measuring conductivity is a bit of a con, as the different ions do not have quite the same mobility in a given electric field, but close enough for some generalizations to within a factor of 2. That may sound terrible, but as the salt concentration varies by factors of ten and is about as uniform as wind-speed in places where water flows and mixes, it is often good enough.

(1uS/cm is 1 megohm.cm and 100uS/cm is 10kohm.cm 1000uS.cm 1k ohm.cm)

This is American, and their idea of clean tap water is not the same as ours, but it is similar.

Note the dramatic effect of seawater -  less than 20 ohms across a 1cm cube.
A nice demo of this can be done at the dining table with a traditional torch bulb and battery,  and a glass of water and the salt cellar - the lamp is off with the water from the jug in the circuit, but add salt and it rapidly brightens up, and then raising and lowering the cutlery into the solution gives a controllable dimmer action.
I strongly suggest not doing this without the host's prior agreements, and not with expensive cutlery.
cheap stainless is best. And do not use wine, its a waste.
Mike.

Mike.

My guess is that the 3-phase overhead lines are either 22 kV (rare but does exist) or 33 kV. Both between phases whereas the railway single phase supply is 25 kV.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_salute ISTR one instance where an overenthusiastic fireman(?) aimed the water jet into the aircraft's engine. https://www.flightglobal.com/united-airlines-unitentional-foam-salute-that-damaged-boeing-777-meant-as-water-salute-says-dulles-fire-crew-/71256.article ooops!

Clive