"The list on my site isn’t current,” David Rifkin says, “but I can send you an updated version.” He’s referring to a Microsoft Word document titled “Electric Shock Drowning Incident List,” and as its name suggests, it’s a somber affair.
May 20, 2013 – Grayson County, Ky. … A 36-year-old man … jumped into the water when [his] dog was having problems. Witnesses report the man’s eyes rolled back, and he went under the water suddenly.
July 4, 2012 – Lake of the Ozarks, Mo. … A 13-year-old girl and her 8-year-old brother were killed by electricity while swimming near a private dock. Officials said the dock was not protected by a GFCI as required.
The document continues on like this for 14 pages, documenting more than a hundred cases of adults and children who’ve died — or just barely escaped death — due to stray current that leaked into the water where they were swimming. Rifkin, a retired U.S. Navy captain, owns Quality Marine Services, a Jacksonville, Fla., consulting company that specializes in corrosion analysis at marinas. He’s been scanning newspapers and running Google searches for years now, amassing this collection of stories to build a case for the dangers of what he calls “electric shock drowning” or ESD. Like the name suggests, ESD is a death in the water caused by electric shock. But it doesn’t have to be the result of electrocution; even small amounts of current radiating from the metal hull of a boat with faulty wiring can be enough to cause a person’s body to seize and prevent them from swimming to safety.
Of all the stories on Rifkin’s list, there’s one that hit him especially hard. “Like all of the others, it didn’t have to happen,” he says. “It shouldn’t have happened.” But it did, and he and a handful of others are working to make sure that something good can come of it.
Silent killer
At first, when the boys started screaming, their families thought they’d been stung by bees or bitten by snakes. It was 2:20 in the afternoon on July 4, 2012 — it seems so many of these incidents occur on a July 4 holiday, as summer boating season really gets underway — and 10-year-old Noah Dean Winstead and his 11-year-old friend, Nate Lynam, were swimming between two boats at the German Creek Marina in Grainger County, Tenn.
But as the adults caught sight of Noah Dean and Nate, struggling to keep their heads above water, it was obvious that their situation was much more dire. One after another, Nate’s grandparents, parents, and a family friend jumped in to help, only to have their bodies seize up as well. It wasn’t until another friend tripped a breaker on the boat that the adults’ muscles relaxed, and they were able to make their way out of the water. For the boys, though, it was too late. Noah Dean died there at the dock; Nate died the following day.
The culprit? Frayed wiring on one of the boats energized its hull, sending lethal levels of current into the water. But an investigation by the state’s Department of Commerce and Insurance found that the entire marina was rife with problems, including nearly two dozen instances of missing ground wires or the use of power meters not rated for a marine environment.
Fourth Judicial District Attorney General Jimmy Dunn chose not to press charges, though, opting instead to encourage the German Creek Marina and others in the state to be proactive in searching for and correcting their electrical system deficiencies. “It is my sincere hope,” Dunn said at the time, “that this tragedy will serve as a catalyst for education, regulation, and enforcement that will save the lives of others.”
But for Noah Winstead’s mother, Jessica, that wasn’t enough.
Ongoing dilemma
The rules that cover the installation of wiring and equipment in marinas and boatyards can be found in Art. 555 of the 2014 National Electrical Code (NEC), and the methods prescribed for preventing deaths like those that occurred on July 4, 2012, are straightforward:
“555.3 Ground Fault Protection. The main overcurrent protective device that feeds the marina shall have ground fault protection not exceeding 100mA. Ground fault protection of each individual branch or feeder circuit shall be permitted as a suitable alternative.”
Additional electrical wiring and equipment requirements are outlined in Chapter 5 of NFPA 303, Fire Protection Standard for Marinas and Boatyards. As noted in this document’s official scope summary, “This standard applies to the construction and operation of marinas, boatyards, yacht clubs, boat condominiums, docking facilities associated with residential condominiums, multiple-docking facilities at multiple-family residences, and all associated piers, docks, and floats. This standard is not intended to apply to a private, non-commercial docking facility constructed or occupied for the use of the owners or residents of the associated single-family dwelling.”
And yet, despite the obvious threat presented by the combination of electricity and water, it’s not uncommon to find legacy systems at older marinas with little to no ground fault protection. “Commercial docks around here are a mess because they’ve been there forever,” says Dave Russell, of Jet City Electric, near Seattle. Russell does the bulk of his work on residential docks around Lake Washington, sticking mainly to residential installations because the larger marinas can be so gnarly. “We’ve walked into places to check on them, and it’s pretty scary stuff.”
Bruce LaLonde, of LaLonde Electric in Estacada, Ore., overhauled a 20-year-old electrical system at a marina on the Columbia River in summer 2013, and although the existing system was still in working order, it was only a matter of time before it failed. “There was no GFCI protection at all,” LaLonde says. “And they’d used all hard conduit, whereas the new methods call for flexible, marine-rated wire.” The project ended up lasting the entire summer.
If the frequency with which electric shock drowning has occurred over the last decade is any indication, older marinas willing to take corrective measures before accidents happen are few and far between. In fact, getting someone to take the initiative to address the situation at all can be a challenge. Forensic Engineer James Angelo Ruggieri, P.E., of General Machine Corp, Fairfax, Va., has investigated dozens of electric shock drownings in his career, and one issue common to all of them was the difficulty in establishing fault because there is rarely a clear authority having jurisdiction. “The NEC is the generally recognized standard for residential construction, but it stops at the receptacle feeding the dock. Whatever happens after that is somebody else’s jurisdiction.” As such, he says, “You’ve got to widen the scope of the county’s authority if they’re going to be the enforcement authority. However, you also have to provide relevant code requirements for them to enforce.”
Taking action
It was the knowledge that so many marinas are in such poor shape — and, therefore, that so many more children could still be at risk — that made it difficult for Jessica Winstead to settle for hoping that marina owners would do the right thing. Inspired by West Virginia’s Michael Cunningham Act of 2013, which more or less took the NEC’s rules regarding marinas and made them law, Winstead began lobbying the Tennessee state legislature for something similar — it was about that time that she met Rifkin.
Along with running Quality Marine Services, Rifkin also partners with Kevin Ritz on the Electric Shock Drowning Prevention Association, a 501(c)(3) they launched to bring awareness to the dangers of faulty wiring at docks and marinas. Ritz has become a nationally recognized expert on the subject, having spent the last 15 years — since his 8-year-old son died in an Oregon river — preaching the need for more stringent electrical safety practices on the water.
By 2013, Rifkin had read about Noah Dean and Nate and about Jessica Winstead’s work in the legislature. Her efforts to prevent future deaths on the water were right in line with the nonprofit’s goals, so he reached out to her and offered help in finding just the right verbiage for the bill. “The first drafts were very, very strict,” Rifkin says. “So it was a matter of crafting the language in such a way that you would make marinas safer but not bludgeon the industry into submission to the point that they couldn’t afford to operate.”
In the end, the bill cribbed directly from the NEC’s requirements, calling for ground fault protection not to exceed 100mA. However, it goes one step further: The legislation also goes so far as to mandate that all sources of electrical supply at marinas installed after April 1, 2015, be inspected annually. It’s the punishments written into the law that give it its teeth, though: A violation of the ground fault rules discovered during an inspection will set a marina back $2,500. A violation that results in a serious but non-fatal injury costs up to $5,000 and six months in jail. And a violation that leads to death? Well, that’s a $50,000 fine and as much as a year in jail.
Once they had the wording down, it didn’t take long for the bill to move through the legislature. With sponsorship from State Representatives Tilman Goins and Steve Southerland, the Noah Dean and Nate Act passed the state senate without a single vote in opposition on March 17, 2014. A month later, it passed the state house of representatives, 95-0. Governor Bill Haslam signed it into law on May 16, and it is set to take effect April 1, 2015.
And yet, there are those who feel that additional protective measures should be put in place to protect swimmers. Ruggieri, the former electrical engineering chief of the U.S. Coast Guard, doesn’t believe that GFCIs alone can provide 100% certainty in preventing in-water shocks — citing multiple cases of electric shock drowning involving GFCI-protected branch circuits. “GFCIs are better than nothing, but they’re not designed to address shocks in submerged applications,” he says. “The reason being is that the cross-thoracic current required to cause a problem for someone in the water is lower than the targeted Class A GFCI time-current thresholds.”
It’s not often you’ll find a law stricter than the technical requirements that inform it, which is why he believes the NFPA is doing swimmers a disservice by calling for GFCIs and leaving it at that. John Drengenberg, an electrical engineer and UL’s Consumer Safety Director, concurs — but with reservations. Although he “supports the NEC wholeheartedly,” he also acknowledges that GFCIs aren’t necessarily sufficient for use near water. “You can’t put a simple household GFCI in a marina and say it’s going to work when somebody is submerged in the water,” he says. “We don’t have the data to show that that is, in fact, going to protect anybody.” That said, he admits we can’t say for sure that GFCIs aren’t sufficient. “We just don’t know at this point,” he says. “We need more data.”
Having dealt with the issue of ESD for much of his career, Ruggieri offers up an additional protective measure: isolation transformers at the shore-power stations fed from a GFCI-protected branch circuit feeder. Ruggieri says such a system provides a practical means with as close to zero as possible (aside from providing no AC power means) of causing an ESD incident.
Isolation transformers can set a marina owner back upwards of $500, but by Ruggieri’s math, that’s a small price to pay to ensure the safety of anyone swimming nearby — especially compared to the price of a boat or, for that matter, a wrongful death lawsuit. “While many believe that some legislation is better than no legislation, that’s not true in this case,” he says. “What will happen is that folks will come to believe that GFCIs will do the trick — that they are safe — and you will have more deaths.”
Rifkin isn’t swayed. “Some believe that if you can’t solve the problem completely then do nothing,” he says. “Put it this way: Reducing the speed limit to 1 mph will prevent 99.9% of traffic accident deaths. But is that to say that lowering it from 70 mph to 60 mph will have zero effect?”
Poised for change
Although this law’s scope is obviously limited to just one state, the tide appears to be turning. There is, of course, West Virginia’s Michael Cunningham Act, which passed in 2013, and efforts are underway in the Kentucky legislature to pass a similar bill, known as the Samantha Chipley Act. That means countless marinas will soon fall under the new regulations.
“If I was a contractor, I’d be sending all of the marinas a copy of this legislation,” Rifkin says. “Then just spell it out: These are the specific electrical requirements, and they must be provided by somebody qualified. We can provide the services, and here’s what our estimate would be to do your marina.”
Even the annual inspection requirement opens up a host of opportunities. There’s checking connections for tightness, corrosion, wear, and tear. There’s checking the integrity of the grounding system and verifying that the ground fault protection — if there is any — is working properly. “It’s tedious work,” Rifkin says. “But you’re going to find issues, and those issues will need to be repaired. It’s like going to the doctor for a physical: He finds problems, and then he treats those problems.”
Even in states without laws like the Noah Dean and Nate Act, there will always be plenty of chances to do things the right way. Dave Russell, of Jet City Electric, gets requests all the time to install outlets at the end of private docks that owners can plug their motorized jet ski lifts into. “Well, once you do that, then they can use it for something else,” he says. Instead, he wires the lifts directly and makes sure they’re GFCI-protected. “That way, it prevents them from going out there with extension cords and doing all kinds of crazy stuff.”
In other words, there are things you can control and things you can’t control. The biggest variable in any marina is the human element. System modifications, improper use of the existing equipment, even something as simple as the failure to use marine-rated extension cords — all of them prove that no matter how conscientious a contractor is when installing an electrical system near water, accidents happen.
That’s why there’s one other requirement in Tennessee’s new law: the installation of signs in every marina stating “Electric Shock Hazard Risk: No Swimming Within 100 Yards of the Boat Dock.” The signs were included in the bill as a concession to marina owners — warn boaters of the potential for danger in the water, the thinking goes, and you’ve reduced your own liability considerably — but it’s also an acknowledgement of the simple fact that the only way to completely prevent electric shock drowning is to stay out of any water near electrical systems.
Rifkin’s not naïve. Even with the Noah Dean and Nate Act in place, he’ll continue to read newspapers and run his Google searches for stories to add to his electric shock drowning list, because this is just the first step. But it is a step, nonetheless. “Change is incremental,” he says. “We can’t get it all in one shot, but if we can change things a little, then we’ll be better off than we were the previous year. And we will save lives. Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s a hundred. But we’re better off than we were.”
Halverson is a contributing writer based in Seattle. He can be reached at [email protected].
SIDEBAR 1: Research Project Seeks Out Mitigation Strategies
In mid-December 2013, The Fire Protection Research Foundation announced a project to “identify and summarize available information that clarifies the problem of hazardous voltage/current in marinas, boatyards, and floating buildings, and to develop a mitigation strategy to address identified hazards.” The project has been broken down into five key tasks.
Task 1: Review of Literature and Data Collection
Task 2: Identification of Available Technology
Task 3: Technology Assessment
Task 4: Recommended Approach
Task 5: Final Report
SIDEBAR 2: Topic Sparks Online Opinion and Interaction
What lies beneath the surface at more marinas and docks than inspectors can cite or industry experts want to admit is the potential for stray voltage flowing through water that stems from improper electrical installations — a silent killer that only waits to add the names of more victims to its list of casualties. So what can we do as a professional community to help eliminate electric shock drowning and electrocution tragedies and better protect the public? That was a question posed to EC&M readers recently on our new online discussion forum, EC&M Talk. Here’s some opinion on the subject from active posters on the thread.
“You can’t help stupid,” says one reader, who noted that if you look at most of the technology products introduced into the code, such as GFCIs, AFCIs, smoke detectors, and CO2 detectors, many people never get their property inspected or reviewed by professionals. He maintains that most of these issues could be reduced, if not eliminated altogether, if people just understood how it all fits together.
Another poster insists prevention is possible, but notes the problem stems from the fact that there are typically no warning signs that the danger exists. He says the only way to address these issues is to install a device that continuously monitors for dangerous voltage conditions and alerts people if and when they exist.
Part of the problem is that the local AHJ doesn’t want and/or know what to do because of lack of guidance, notes another person. “NFPA 70 stops at the shore-side receptacle, while USCG invokes nothing relevant and helpful, and ABYC is focused elsewhere,” he said. “That is, there is a regulatory gap.” Although the Tennessee proposal to mandate GFCIs is a step, he says it won’t by itself be sufficiently effective to reduce this risk closer to zero where it belongs. “Only by using isolation transformers fed from a GFCI branch circuit, together with continual leakage monitoring, AHJ initial inspection/approval and periodic inspection, etc., can the likelihood for the numbers of such events be reduced to near zero.”
To read the online discussion in its entirety or add your two cents to the thread, visit EC&M Talk.
SIDEBAR 3: Lessons Learned from Forensic Casebook
Taking an in-depth look at specific electrical accidents from a forensic engineering perspective, “Forensic Casebook” has been an overwhelming favorite with EC&M readers for more than a decade. By showing the consequences of carelessness, shortcuts, or failure to follow proper safety procedures, this department enables design engineers and electrical technicians working in the field to learn from others’ mistakes by walking them through real-world incidents. Although the culprits behind the accidents in Forensic Casebook vary drastically in cause, several over the years have stemmed from stray voltage in water. Following are a few examples that provide mounting evidence of this ongoing problem.
SIDEBAR 4: In the News
EC&M has reported on several stories recently that relate to the hazards electricity presents in marina and dock applications. Read the news reports at ecmweb.com.
Lake Community Focuses on Dock Inspections
A village on the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri has focused more attention on electrical inspections of docks recently. The Village of the Four Seasons, which has a population of about 2,200 but draws a significant number of tourists to the lake each year, recently took matters into its own hands to improve safety. The village’s Board of Trustees met in March and amended the requirements of the 2011 Edition of the NEC by adding additional requirements for docks located within the Village of Four Seasons. According to Lake News Online, “Anyone seeking a permit from Ameren Missouri for any of several docks must pass and obtain an electrical inspection performed by the Village building inspector.”
Swimmers Report Shock in Missouri Lake
After people swimming near a dock this summer at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri reported feeling a shock in the water, they quickly got out and called for help. Although an electrician from a local electrical contractor turned off the power to the dock they were swimming by, it did not resolve the issue. So then he had to go from property to property, asking permission to shut off power to each nearby dock. The current was found to be coming from an abandoned ramp 100 yards away. Apparently, the dock had been disconnected years ago, but the electric line feeding it had not been disconnected from the main breaker box. Instead, the breaker had been simply turned off and the wire wrapped around the frame of the ramp. During some recent work, that breaker had been turned back on, and the owner estimates it had been on — electrifying the water — for a month.
American Boat & Yacht Council Steps Up Electric Shock Drowning Prevention Efforts
The American Boat & Yacht Council’s Foundation (ABYC) is partnering with the Energy Education Council’s Safe Electricity “Teach Learn Care TLC” campaign to help prevent electric shock drowning (ESD). The safety messages include proper maintenance of a boat’s electrical system and safe actions in the water. Thanks to a grant recently awarded by the National Fire Protection Association’s Fire Protection Research Foundation and support from the ABYC Foundation, an expert investigation for solutions on the dockside mitigation of this hazard is underway.