Careful where you pee

You gotta go, you gotta go, sure. But when taking BART, you might want to reconsider peeing while down near the tracks. From Illinois:

An Indiana man died when he tried urinating on subway tracks Sunday night.

Zachary McKee, 27, died after falling on the electrically charged third rail at the South Boulevard Purple Line ‘L’ stop in Evanston, Ill., which he touched by climbing onto the tracks to relieve himself.

Ouch. Read the rest of the story at The Daily News.

Thx: Amy of Tiny Rides

7 comments

  • Except *all* of Muni’s electric vehicles are powered by overhead wires. If someone can pee on those, I’ll be *really* impressed. 😉

  • Muni Diaries via Facebook

    That would be some feat, but this was for our BART people. Safe vs. sorry, so yeah, don’t try peeing on the Muni ones either. You know who you are.

  • As a transplanted Chicagoan, I feel the need to point out these deaths are surprisingly routine. What is particularly stupid about this incident is that he was dumb enough to climb onto the tracks to whiz as opposed to the already stupid decision to whiz onto the tracks from the platform. My rule of thumb: try not to pee on public transit at all.

  • Dexter Wong

    My high school physics teacher pointed out that it is imperative not to put yourself between a high current source and a ground to complete the circuit and electrocute yourself. He used in a story about his boyhood in Boston to illustrate the point: one night he and his friends jumped off a subway platform to balance themselves on a rail. they jumped from one rail to the next until they had both feet on the third rail (but touching nothing else). As they carefully jumped off that rail to head back toward the platform, one boy mistakenly touched two rails at once and was electrocuted. At his funeral, my future instructor remarked that it was the difference in current that killed him.

  • D

    Here’s an episode of MYTHBUSTERS that covered that very topic!

    http://youtu.be/pDY-0ijiOEQ

  • Dexter Wong

    Yes they did cover that topic, but they didn’t finding any possible harm until the second time they covered it. Apparently the volume of liquid didn’t give them proper results the first time.

  • Oh I thought it was a drug reference ….once I saw a mouse on the BART tracks….it was fine though because it could only touch one rail at a time.

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