Reading this is starting to convince me I should hang up my engineer hat and go to law school.

I'm no expert in "stray voltage" but I'm absolutely shocked (no pun intended) by the conduct of the utilities here. The fact that they drag their feet with obvious problems with uncontrolled earth potentials that they are clearly at fault for due to negligent design and/or maintenance seems bizarre to me. Since there is no way to guarantee _absolute_ safety, there are reasonable expectations that there are some fault conditions that are not reasonably foreseeable or preventable. However most of these "stray voltage" situations are not unforseeable or unpreventable at all, particularly when it is brought to their attention by customers after obvious customer wiring problems have been eliminated as a potential source.

The levels of earth potentials being discussed here are clearly high enough to create several credible and likely scenarios which could induce heart fibrillation in susceptible individuals. While I'm not an expert in heart fibrillation and AC current, I did spend a brief stint in a clinical engineering department in a hospital and I know absolutely that currents across the chest of around 100uA can cause potentially fatal heart fibrillation in susceptible people.

Reading this sure makes me wish I had a JD and passed the bar in affected areas. You'd think there'd already have been a few cases of death and disability credibly linked to stray voltage. It fits all the criteria for a gold mine of a legal case: 1. Defendants with deep pockets 2. Clear negligence in design and maintenance, probably with lots of discoverable evidence with utilities analyzing the cost/benefits of fixing the problem 3. Fairly simple technical material that is unlikely to have much technical controversy on material issues among expert witnesses 4. A pattern and practice spanning the whole utility creating the possibility of class-action lawsuit.

Now that's a 40% cut I'd love to take. - it'd even make John Edward's drool.