The large orange X on the sidewalk half a block from my apartment marks the spot where my dog nearly died three months ago. It was the first Sunday in March, about eight o’clock in the evening. It had rained all day. I was walking Faustus, a rescued 45-pound chow mix, down Addison just east of Broadway, the same block we’d walked twice a day for close to four years. We were almost home, but as we passed a street lamp his back legs suddenly gave out. He began howling. In a few seconds the howls became screams. He fell on his side, legs spasming, his head lashing from side to side.
The woman with the cell phone stepped up and handed it to me. An emergency vet was on the line. “It sounds like he’s having a seizure,” the vet said. “Has he had seizures before?”
A dark-haired woman in some sort of medical uniform was bending over me. She’d been driving an ambulance down Addison when someone flagged her. Faustus was howling again, but with less intensity than before. The froth from his mouth was turning red–he must have bitten his tongue. He lay calm for a moment, and the ambulance driver tore a thin strip from a terry-cloth towel and tied his jaws closed. Then she asked a skinny guy from her ambulance to bring over a sheet. She said we’d pick Faustus up, dump him on the sheet, and put him in the back of my car. Except I didn’t have a car.
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A few weeks after Faustus’s gruesome evening, a chow-collie mix named Barkis was electrocuted on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. Like the Addison sidewalk near my apartment, the concrete under Barkis’s feet was wet and salty. According to a news report, Barkis “went into a fury so violent–eyes flaring, teeth gnashing–that [the owner] was afraid his dog would attack him.” Beneath the sidewalk was an exposed wire carrying 70 volts of electricity intended for a street lamp that had been removed in 1999.
“This phenomenon is not mysterious,” says Allen Taflove, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University who has studied the hazards of electricity carried by high-voltage transmission lines. “The electrical infrastructure gets old, and insulation around wires degrades. Some of the wires might have been buried decades ago.” He says moisture and salt contribute to the deterioration and help conduct underground currents to the surface. “The wire is usually cased inside a metal conduit. During a storm water may leak into the conduit and travel along the wire. At some point the water may come in contact with a part of the wire where the insulation has deteriorated. The water conducts the electricity from the wire to the conduit and then to whatever is saturated outside the conduit.” Cracks on the surface can carry the current, he says, but if the pavement is thoroughly saturated, they aren’t always necessary. “It turns out that concrete is not always an insulator. Concrete can be a conductor itself, depending on its composition.”
In New York, Lane’s 2004 death caused community uproar. A month after the incident, city-council member Margarita Lopez introduced legislation requiring Con Ed to inspect all its manholes and service boxes every year. Then in the middle of March two more dogs were shocked on a wet East Village sidewalk a few blocks from where Lane had died. The dogs hadn’t stepped on anything metal: a 70-year-old wire underneath the pavement had frayed, touched the conduit, and electrified the concrete.
Half an hour later, the vet called me back in. The X-rays showed no damage to internal organs, he said, but the real danger was pulmonary edema–fluid and swelling in the lungs–which can be deadly and typically develops in the first 18 to 24 hours after an electric shock. He wanted to keep Faustus overnight for observation. Jeff and Lara drove me home.
