I wonder how many cats had already shuffled off this mortal electrified coil before the dog died ...

I hope this means they will get around to replacing the utility pole in front of my house (which has a streetlight on it) before it falls down. I reported that it looked very damaged months ago, and they said they'd get right on it. So far, they have not. I'm kind of surprised some of these wind gusts have not knocked it down yet. If a drunk drives into it, it's totally a goner.

"Sammy with his oner Lisa"? What exactly is a "oner"?

RIP Sammy.

It's not the voltage that will kill you, it's the amperage.

Poor Sammy. What a horrible way to go. We have four dogs, and I can't imagine what that would be like.

Bella, is there a white ring around the pole? That means it's slated to be replaced. If you want to speed things up a bit, call your service center: north of Denny is 615-0600, south of Denny 386-4200, tell them your address and ask to speak to your neighborhood service representative.

:(

We could have takend any one of you but chose the dog instead.

The dog being killed brought the problem to the attention of City Light. They handled the situation well--it looks like they went above and beyond industry standards. So to say that it took a dog to be killed is misleading. Out of 80,000 streetlights there were only 50 or so that were dangerous and they addressed the problem.

But leave it to the Stranger to sensationalize!

This situation in Seattle explained something that happened to me in Chicago 20 years ago. I was walking around somewhere, wearing shoes with a leather sole that was soaking wet. I tripped a bit at one point and my foot bumped into the base of a streetlight and I had something that felt like a seizure.

A minute later, when I was able to speak again, I told my friends "I think I just got electrocuted." It felt very weird and scary, but at the time I was certain that had happened -- but how could something like that happen on a public Chicago sidewalk?

As the years went by and the experience faded, I began to doubt myself a bit. How could a light pole be live, surrounded by pedestrians? Had it been something else? Maybe an actual seizure? (I've never had anything else like one.)

Then this story broke and I realized it was probably the same situation.

Electricity is transient. If a connection is old, or was poorly done, it might only energize things around it intermitently. The poor doggy was just barefoot in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But speaking of that: A few years back a woman was walking barefoot down the Vegas strip in a rainstorm. She stepped on a vault lid that had become energized and was electrocuted. That thing was carrying a lot more voltage than that streetlight box the dog stepped on, but it only takes a little to kill you.

No matter how carefully something is designed and installed, People do dumb things around electricity all the time. People pee into the transformer vaults in the sidewalks and alleys. There was a restaurant that was pouring all their grease down one, thinking it was the storm sewer (nice, eh?) . Scrappers strip stuff for copper without checking to see if it is energized. it's amazing there's not more stuff like this.

A nine year old boy was electrocuted in Columbus, OH by the same thing in 2003.

I read the story when it came out and every time I think about it, it just tears my heart in half :(

you have to understand that our power distribution system in america is a fucking joke, It receives such insignificant funding and quite a bit of it was installed in the same decade and when you start seeing failures you should expect much more in the future. Prepare to see a shit-ton more infrastructure failure, from bridges to utility lines, in the coming years, we've been neglecting this issue far too long