In the early-morning hours of July 4, 18-year-old swimmer Jesse Hamric became unresponsive in Smith Mountain Lake and later died.
People who pulled Hamric out of the water by the dock at the Huddleston home reported feeling like they were being shocked, and first responders posited that stray voltage emanating from the dock’s electric boat lift was the cause.
Stray voltage occurs when electricity leaks into bodies of water due to a fault in circuits. It can happen anywhere that electricity is found near water — docks, marinas, boats, swimming pools, fountains, even flooded basements. People in the water in the vicinity of stray voltage can suffer from electric shock drowning, the passage of alternating current through the body that renders the swimmer effectively paralyzed and unable to swim.
The phenomenon is often hard to pin down as a cause of death because it generally happens on an intermittent basis, and it’s nearly impossible to differentiate from conventional drowning. ESD is almost exclusively observed in fresh water, because the human body is a better conductor than fresh water but not salt water.
The investigation into Hamric’s death is ongoing, Bedford County Sheriff’s Office Major Jon Wilks said, and the medical examiner’s conclusions are not yet public.
But Ray Talley, assistant chief at the Smith Mountain Lake Marine Volunteer Fire Department who responded at the scene of Hamric’s death, said the electric boat lift at the dock was in the water at the time and that voltage readings at the scene were “reading off the charts,” as he told The Roanoke Times. He said the voltage reading disappeared once the boat lift was raised out of the water.
In response to Hamric’s death, Franklin County-based Blackwater Diving Company began advertising free stray voltage testing to lake residents.
The Electric Shock Drowning Prevention Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of safety around electricity and water, has documented 112 instances of ESD from 1986 to 2023. Only one of those took place in Virginia, a 2001 incident at Lake Montclair in Prince William County in which two boys drowned near a pontoon boat that was attached to a battery charger via an extension cord from a home.
One of the main hurdles in preventing electric shock drowning is the public’s lack of awareness about the issue.
“There’s not enough people who know what ESD is,” said Corey Hannahs, senior electrical content specialist with the National Fire Protection Association.
The NFPA is the keeper of the National Electrical Code, a 1,000-plus-page publication it updates every handful of years, most recently in 2023. Each state determines which version of the code to enforce. Hannahs said some states are still operating on editions as far back as 2009; Virginia enforces the 2020 version.
Hannahs said the most important thing that people can do to mitigate the risk of electric shock drowning is to ensure that electrical systems near water are up to the latest code. That includes installing ground-fault circuit interrupter, or GFCI, outlets on all outdoor circuits; checking those outlets at least monthly; and periodically inspecting electrical systems for damaged or frayed wires.
“If there’s electricity near the water … you have to think about the things you probably wouldn’t particularly think about,” Hannahs said.
But as for safe practices around the water, there is a lot of variance in what counsel the NFPA would give, due to regional differences in building styles and code standards.
“It’s hard to put a blanket statement out,” Hannahs said.
But he added that it is never advisable to swim in areas where there is a lot of electricity running near the water, such as marinas. In those settings, many boats are connected to shore power, and people use any number of do-it-yourself measures to run electronics on their boats that are often not installed up to code.
“There’s a lot of different scenarios in that marina … that can present additional electrical challenges,” Hannahs said.
If Hamric’s death was caused by ESD, it would be the first-ever recorded such death at Smith Mountain Lake. But this isn’t the first time the issue of stray voltage has drawn attention at the popular recreation spot.
In January 2020, Jim Erler stood before a who’s who of electrical building code experts in Richmond, led by the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. His mission: to change the Virginia building code to make docks safer from stray voltage.
Erler began studying stray voltage in 2017 at his former home at Smith Mountain Lake after noticing the phenomenon at his own dock. A physicist who made a career designing electrical systems, Erler concluded that the voltage at his dock was coming from the ground wire that led back to his home and the transformer that provided power to it.
He and a local volunteer firefighter, Neil Harrington, began looking into stray voltage on a larger scale and found the issue so widespread that they began to work to alter Virginia’s electrical code.
They posited that the answer was to require a grounding rod from the dock to the earth rather than a wire back to the home’s electrical system, which is what’s required under current code, both national and state.
“If your power is off on your house, and you measure a voltage between a metal part of your dock and the water, you will see a voltage there all the time,” Erler claimed.
Erler, Harrington and attorney John Lane, another Smith Mountain Lake resident, made their proposal in the code development cycle in 2019 and 2020. But Erler said the opposition from the NFPA and other industry professionals was strong.
Erler said it became clear that he wasn’t going to make headway. “I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” he said.
Erler’s previous proposal did not move past the DHCD’s sub-work group. But the group did adopt a change that was in the 2020 version of the NEC, which established a minimum of 2 feet above a body’s normal highest water level for electrical installations and required use of GFCI outlets.
Appalachian Power, which operates the dam at the lake and manages its shoreline, said it couldn’t speak to the circumstances around the incident but that it requires safe building practices around the reservoir.
“Appalachian Power’s role regarding docks involves granting property owners a permit to occupy space within the reservoir for private recreational use,” the company said in a statement. “As part of our permitting process, we require property owners work with their respective county to ensure their docks meet the applicable building and electrical codes.”
A number of products exist that claim to be designed to mitigate the risks posed by stray voltage, most notably so-called green light devices such as Shock Alert that deploy sensors in the water to detect voltage and use a red-light, green-light protocol to inform swimmers whether it’s safe to swim.
Hannahs said that such systems can be useful but that the NFPA has not taken an official position on them. The Electric Shock Drowning Prevention Association released a position statement advising against such devices in 2016, contending that they “create a false sense of safety” for swimmers and that such systems cannot predict future voltage conditions in the water. Instead, the association suggests swimmers stay at least 150 feet away from areas where electricity and water could meet, including docks with power.
Hannahs said he understands that suggestion is not always practical for people who choose to swim off of private docks like the one where Hamric died. (Hannahs published an entry on the NFPA’s blog about ESD on July 1 featuring tips for safety.)
“People would have to make their own decisions on how they want to manage their risk,” he said.
Erler maintains that his suggestion a few years ago was not out of left field; he said the international electrical code requires electricity near bodies of water be managed in the same way he was suggesting back then.
“We’re the only country, at least in the first world, that has this code this way,” he said. “The rest of the world has recognized that this is a problem and has fixed it.”
He contends that the updates the DHCD did adopt still don’t address the problem of stray voltage, and he argued that something as minor as a neighbor turning on an appliance could cause that voltage to rise to dangerous levels.
He said, however, that no one should ever adjust their dock’s wiring so that it’s out of code. Instead, his suggestion is to power the dock with lower-voltage direct-current power of no more than 12 volts, and to use solar panels and battery banks to operate electrical equipment on docks, much the way recreational vehicles’ electric systems are designed.
“My opinion is there shouldn’t be 110 volts on any dock, ever. Period,” Erler said.
For the NFPA’s part, Hannahs said the process to update the National Electrical Code is open to change by a process outlined on its website. Hannahs declined to comment on the specifics of Erler’s proposal, citing differing uses of technical terms by professionals in different parts of the electrical industry.
“If determined that the safety of the public is at risk, that certainly is a worthwhile point to bring up as part of that process,” Hannahs said.
