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I was trying to fix a nail on my wall and it seems that I may have ran the nail into a wire. Pulling the nail back causes the lights in my room to go dark. I pushed it back in and my room seems fine, and, I plan on getting it fixed soon.
However, should I take any precautions before the time it actually gets fixed? The nail I was using was about 5-7 cm.
You took a chunk out of the wire, if not severed the whole wire. That means it's thinner, or out of contact entirely.
If it's thinner, that means current is squeezing through a narrow part. This will make the wire hot there. It could get hot enough to ignite a fire on the wrong side of the walls.
Of if the wire is cut entirely, or passing through the nail, it is bound to start arcing. Arcing makes a tremendous amount of heat - it will heat up much, much faster than a nicked wire, and could start a fire going in less than a minute.
Drywall is a fire-stop. That means, fires which start in between the walls are hard to detect. They can become "fully engaged" (turned into a pretty big fire) before you even detect it.
And then what? It's almost impossible to fight a fire on the wrong side of the drywall, unless you are a pro fireman who hatchets drywall every day. By the time they arrive, the fire will be so engaged that they'll have to wreck the place to save the structure at all.
Obviously, this is a common risk. Every country has an electrical code (really, although it is sometimes not enforced pre-accident) and many electrical codes provide provisions for how to resolve the conflict between wire damage and nailing things to walls. For instance some countries require metal plates to guard cables, or that wires be placed a certain depth in the wall - that creates a "safety zone" where one can nail with confidence as long as your nail is short, and you don't power through a guard plate.
It's best to learn the convention in your country, and follow it.
It needs to be fixed now. That nail has contact with electricity and anyone touching it that and is also grounded can die. It can also heat up the wire and cause a fire. Turn off the breaker for that circuit until it is fixed.
Do not leave until it is fixed. It is dangerous to you and your house. Turn off the breakers one by one until the light goes off. Do not trust the switch.
Something no one else said, placed here for future readers;
Yes, you should worry. Do not do this ever again. If you need to put pointy metal things in walls, get a cable tracker/wire finder/wire tracer device and find out where the cables are before you start. Mark them on the wall. Draw a diagram. Photograph it. Write it down.
As a rule cables installed by qualified electricians in well-regulated countries run tidily vertically and horizontally so you know where to start. The house I am living in right now was a self build, and the builder ran the cables diagonally to save money. May he burn in perdition.
Edit: where I live - yes, Germany - walls tend to be solid masonry. Your cables cannot just dangle around behind the plaster. Though I have seen pre-fab houses where the space is full of insulation, not air, and the cable running inside the wall may not be fixed 100% securely, but it's clipped in place, and yes, it runs orthogonally.
