My Water Heater Burst Open (help)

[Spongebob]

One morning as a kid, going down to breakfast in my pj's, I put my hand on the fridge handle and the other on top of the stove, only to discover that there was a shocking ground leak in one of the two.  Upon telling my dad about this, his only comment was, "Is that a fact," and he went about his business and never did anything about it.  In hindsight I suppose that's reasonable, but I was rather alarmed at the time.

That's not surprising.  Many people take such things lightly and that's the reason people get electrocuted at home and home fires occur when these things are very easily avoided with proper use of electrical components.  What you described can easily be avoided using GFCI and ACFI breakers and this has been demonstrated to government officials, but quite often those officials are not interested in making these devices part of electrical building codes.  The average person doesn't know about them, so how would you know to ask an electrician to install them?  Codes are better now but there are still a lot of older homes/buildings out there that don't have proper protections in place.