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Originally Posted by sprecher48
Just a little warning,if you're wearing contacts and get flashed,go to the e- room asap.you can remove your retinas along with the contacts.  tom |
Sorry but that one is just an urban legend, the story is usually about welders but sometimes it is about an electrician that got flashed from an arc in an electrical box while wearing contacts. Either way that one has been debunked many times over the years and it seems that someone always brought it up at safety meetings, the fact is it simply is not true. The idea was that the lens acted like magnifying glasses and focused the light from the arc onto the retina causing the burn, just as you can do with a magnifying glass and sunlight. The problem is the contact lens is much too small to do such a thing and they are not magnifiers anyway. This story became so widespread that IMSHA actually did some testing even though simple engineering shows that such an event will not happen so if you wear contacts there is nothing to be concerned about, at least not an increaseed chance of eye burn.