Four years ago, a 14-year-old girl touched a fence in a city park in Baltimore and was instantly hit with a lethal 227 volts of electricity. An exposed underground power cable happened to be touching the fence, just one example of hundreds of sites throughout the city that are still “pulsing with potentially deadly stray voltage,” according to WJZ, the city’s CBS affiliate.
Now the girl’s father, ex-NFL star Anthony “Bubba” Green, is using his Deanna’s Lyric Foundation to push for legislation to deal with “stray voltage.”
Cities all over the U.S. contend with this problem as our infrastructure ages and isn’t replaced. It’s deadly, and it also wastes a huge amount of energy, mostly in the form of heat. A 2002 investigation of the issue found that stray voltage was even killing cows in Wisconsin.
Some companies argue that conducting more than more survey a year is too expensive. But for the Greens, it’s a small price to pay to save a life.
“We’ve paid for this already,” Anthony Green said. “We paid for this with the life of our daughter.”
