A power line hits the ground and the danger doesn’t stop where the cable lands. It spreads outward through the soil beneath your feet, invisible and lethal, in a pattern most people never learn until it’s too late. When an energised conductor contacts the earth, the current doesn’t vanish. It floods into the ground and radiates outward, hunting for any return path. Soil is a poor conductor, so this current forces its way through resistance, and every metre it travels the voltage drops. The result is a set of invisible concentric rings of falling potential, centred on the point of contact. Near the wire the gradient is brutal. The voltage can fall thousands of volts across a single stride. Step across two of those rings and your feet sit at different potentials. That difference drives current up one leg, through your body, and down the other. This is step potential, and it kills people who never touched the line at all. The physics is unforgiving: - Potential falls with distance, ste...