Thanks for that report 32VAC.
My advice to anyone out in the more rural areas, if you lose power, stay indoors.
You can do nothing until a person trained in HV equipment gets to your place.
Going to find a downed power line is one of the silliest ideas this side of the black stump.
The further you are out from a city, the higher the voltage will be too.
I don't think that this guy actually stepped on the downed line, I think that he got so close to it that the step voltage over-rode the insulation value of his footwear.
With some of the more rural areas using voltages in the 10's if not 100's of kV's this is a real worry.
Think of a situation like this as the same as dropping a stone into a pool of water.
The stone is where the cable fell, now you are depending upon a recloser or it could even be an SWER line, where the point of origin of the circuit could be miles away.
High resistance joints (over time) could compromise the protection system, these things are hardly ever tested in rural areas
mean that the chances of a fault clearing could take a lot longer than usual.
Back to the pool of water, if you happen to tread between the ripples, you have a potential difference on each foot, the closer you get to the stone, the higher the step potential difference.
Peoples shoes have melted in some cases, where 11kV lines have fallen here.
