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Even if most of the current goes into the soil, you're still touching thousands of volts at hundreds of Amperes. You might avoid electrocution if you contact at only one spot. (For the same reason birds can perch on high voltage wires without being electrocuted.)
However as soon as you make two points of contact, you offer a path for electricity. Suppose your skin offers 1 Mohm of resistance. Our flesh is an electrolyte. Merely 1 mA through the body can stop our heart.
You can watch videos of linemen working on high tension lines unharmed amid electric sparks a few feet long. Naturally they wear protective suits as well as practice safe procedures in avoiding electrocution.
Here's the deal. The path from the power lines, through the water, to ground has a little resistance (takes only a couple of ohms). Enough resistance that there is significant voltage where the Mr. so and so stepped. Under the existing conditions (wet) Mr. so and so has a low-enough resistance that he got 50 mA or so of current through his body (and 5 or 6 mA directly across his heart). That's all it takes. Watch my video at RSD Academy: 'What is Ground' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXjSSvIrKUw). This might clear things up a bit as well as explode the myth about "shortest path to ground".
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