Updated

An English teen survived a 25,000-volt electrical shock from an overhead power line that burned off his clothes, the Daily Mail reported.

The shock sent Sam Cunningham, 16, 25 feet off a railway bridge and onto the tracks below. He had been retrieving a rugby ball on a bridge near his home in Wigan, England, last Thursday when the current jumped from the electric railway lines to his steel-toe boots, according to the report.

He was knocked unconscious by the fall and all his clothes were singed off, the teen's mother told the Daily Mail.

Cunningham is being treated in the special burns unit at Whiston Hospital in Merseyside. He will need skin grafts but is expected to make a full recovery.

The teen is lucky to be alive.

"The current going through an overhead railway cable would easily be strong enough to kill somebody," Phil Mawby, a professor of engineering at Warwick University, told the Daily Mail.

"It would burn its way through the skin and in some cases stop a person's heart."

Click here to see a photo of Cunningham and for more on this story from the Daily Mail.