Living in Astoria, NY and this happened a mile away from me.
At first my TV blips, my spotify shuts down and outside you could see this very bright turquoise light all over the place. It was bright like it was a daytime just in the green blue color. At first I thought it must had been some fireworks nearby, New Year is coming, right? But there was no fireworks noise, no party noise, nothing, just this bright green lit city. I open the window and some lady in the building across me does the same and shouts 'wtf is that?!'.
I realize this was not a party and my brain starts spinning..
1. EMP attack, since the TV got affected
2. Asteroid or comet entering the atmosphere and messing up the magnetosphere
3. Strong solar outburst, causing some local aurora
I recently watched Robert Schoch's interview where he discussed huge solar outbursts at the end of last ice age and how the sightings of resulting auroras might have made it into ancient cultures.
In the end I rushed to the rooftop, scared as f, and noticed this was just a transformer on fire at nearby power plant. Took a video, waited it out and went back.
I'm glad that you were ok. I would probably have over-reacted by diving under the bed. The lesson that I took from the footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor (1) is this:
When people see a sudden bright light in the sky, the usual reaction is for them to go to the window to see what it is. So then the blast wave arrives in time to give them a face full of flying glass shards. (2)
Don't do this! Doesn't matter if you're being nuked or if it's only a meteor, get down and stay away from the windows! Nothing good will come of having a look-see.
Your comment also reminded me of the Halifax harbor explosion [1]. A ship in the harbor collided with a cargo ship carrying explosives. A fire started and everyone came to their windows to look. Then the cargo ship exploded sending the shockwave through the city. In addition to the people who died in the initial blast another 5900 had eye injuries, mostly from shattered windows. [2]
Knowing what's going on kind of dictates your response. If it's a forest fire, for example, swift action is much preferable to hiding under the bed. Hence looking out the window.
How swift? It can't be more than 15 seconds between flash of light and shockwave. Staying down for that long in case there's a shockwave seems reasonable.
Also, forest fires are not typically sudden flashes of light or found in urban areas. Context matters.
I don't see why IQ would necessarily correlate with knowledge about meteor strike safety best practices.
On the other hand, if innate curiosity about environmental phenomena is at all correlated with IQ, it could result in a lowering of the average IQ instead.
Which are similar (for the first minute anyway) for nuclear strike best practices.
You would hope that there is still some knowledge of these.
The probability of nuclear strike is low at any given time, but at the moment that you experience a unexpected extremely bright light in the sky it's higher.
A 500 kt warhead will kill most people within 3 miles of it, and will continue killing people up to ~6 miles.
These days, a single missile carries 5-10 warheads. They split and spread out over the strike area a few seconds before detonation. One missile can, thanks to this, kill most of the people in a multi-million-person metro area.
Between the two of them, the United States, and Russia are currently pointing 4,000 nuclear weapons at each other, on hair-trigger alert. With another 8,000 in reserve.
It is not clear to me how a scenario where a single nuclear warhead exploding in <wherever you live> is not either a part of, or an immediate trigger for all-out nuclear war.
Superpowers aren't going to use nukes on each other, due to the threat of MAD. Terrorists may be able to steal a nuke and deploy one for their nefarious reasons. Lets say a terrorist group gets a briefcase nuke from somebody, then blows it up in a major city.
500+kt is strategic level, if superpowers used it we're all screwed. But the typical nuke is tactical-level, or ~10kt or so. And tactical-level nukes could be theoretically stolen by groups (there are way more tactical nukes than strategic ones).
We're looking at ~half a mile radius that's blown up, but otherwise a survivable blast. There are rumors that as the USSR collapsed, it lost track of a number of their small tactical-nukes (even if they kept good tabs on their strategic nukes).
It seems far more likely that the next nuke to be used will be a smaller tactical nuke, probably in the hands of terrorists.
The whole point of MAD is that they are perfectly willing to use nukes on eachother. For MAD to work, the threat must be credible. You can't both say that there's nothing to worry about, and claim that MAD works. [1]
A launch in response to a false alarm, a poor decision, or a miscommunication of launch codes are all possible outcomes of the current way that nukes are handled by Russia and the United States. [2]
Of all the things I am concerned about, 'Terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon and blowing it up ten city blocks from me' ranks so far below 'Some idiot in Washington/Moscow/A radar station in Greenland/A submarine off the coast of Kamchatka makes the wrong decision, and ends the world', or 'A bug in the Russian Dead Hand system[3] results in a full nuclear attack against the United States', it's not even worth worrying about.
> There are rumors that as the USSR collapsed, it lost track of a number of their small tactical-nukes (even if they kept good tabs on their strategic nukes).
Nuclear weapons have a shelf-life, and require constant maintenance. Anything that may have been lost 3 decades ago is more likely then not to be junk.
[1] For MAD to actually work, both sides must have perfect information, believe that their opponent has perfect information, be rational, believe that their opponent is rational, to never make a mistake, and assume that their opponent never makes a mistake. [4] There are fairy tales that are more plausible then this. Every year that the current situation continues, we are taking another spin at Russian Roulette.
> In the end I rushed to the rooftop, scared as f, and noticed this was just a transformer on fire at nearby power plant. Took a video, waited it out and went back.
If you detonate a nuclear weapon above a city, no matter how far above, you will call upon you a nuclear response. There’s no difference between an EMP attempt and a nuclear strike. So why would you attempt an EMP attack when that means giving up most of the destructive force to maybe burn out powerlines, and guaranteed surface nuclear response on your territory?
My high school physics says that’s BS, but EMP scare tactics does make for a great info-war weapon. It’s quite the boogeyman if you don’t have much science background.
Stuxnet like attacks are way way more plausible and likely.
It comes across as somewhat condescending and naive to refer to a HS class as having a notable amount of science background. And a reason to dismiss other sources of information.
Sources that invalidate foundational theory? It’s like claims that cell radios cause molecular damage in humans; that probably requires proving Enstien’s Nobel prize winning work on the photoelectric effect is wrong.
You shouldn't be down voted. Non-nuclear EMP devices exist but due to the inverse square law (which we learned in high school physics) we know that they have short effective range. And they require a large conventional explosive to generate the pulse. So they work but are not a major threat worth worrying about.
What does actually work and have been operationally used are graphite bombs designed to short out electrical equipment. Those are much cheaper and more effective than EMP weapons.
Buddy you’re gonna have to learn that sometimes your teachers are just wrong. Just because they’re in some position of authority doesn’t automatically qualify their credentials
What are you talking about? Google 'explosively pumped flux compression generator'. LANL wrote a paper on how to do this in the '70s and did real world tests. You output to the antenna or right into the grid.
The film Threads (which strived for accuracy) had a full scale nuclear attack on the U.K. preceded by a high altitude nuclear detonation over the North Sea, in order to knock out as many systems as possible with an EMP. And from the Starfish Prime test, we know that such events also create an unusual coloured light display.
I don't think you can say EMP weapons don't exist. I know what you're trying to say, but attacking a city with an EMP strike will be seen international ly as far more favorable than an actual strike.
Also, an EMP strike can be detonated really high in the atmosphere where we would have zero chance to intercept and is more economical for non first world countries.
Transformer "explosions" don't last very long. Transformer fires are a different color. [0] As others have noted, the color suggests arcing. Arcing has a number of different causes, but should be brief -- system protection in the form of circuit breakers should interrupt the flow of power immediately ending the arc.
Yes, for a large power transformer the protection scheme should have been able to detect an arcing fault and clear it rapidly. This leaves me to wonder if there was a protection misoperation that occurred in tandem with the fault. If the fault is external to the tank (for instance arcing at the termination of one of the bushings), it may not be in the differential zone of protection, but the overall protection scheme should provide for fast clearing of close-in external faults for the reasons well demonstrated by this incident.
In an arc welder, arcing is the intended mode of operation and any protective devices are set accordingly.
In the protection schemes used on the bulk electrical system, we have very sensitive relaying that can pick up on faults of even milli-amps (remember at high voltage even a small amount of current can dissipate a lot of energy) to detect, for instance, high impedance ground faults or turn-to-turn faults inside a transformer.
The function of the actual circuit breaker - to interrupt current - is not different, although the mechanical construction changes quite a bit when you need to interrupt both very high currents and extinguish the high-voltage arc created when you interrupt the circuit. Inert gas (e.g. SF6) or vacuum are used as dielectric mediums due to the high voltage.
What is different is how the breakers are controlled - rather than being its own stand-alone overcurrent protection device as in a home electrical panel, it's just a dumb device controlled by one or more multifunction microprocessor relays that are designed to detect a variety of power system fault conditions and clear them rapidly to avoid damage to expensive equipment.
High voltage circuit breakers are actually very interesting, videos are on youtube. Some common ones are isolatef with SF6, and as long as there is fluor, it’s nasty.
Looks more like a user experience problem than the content creator's problem
Youtube doesn't post process vertical videos correctly, while Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and many other sites keep the processed video in its flexible aspect ratio - primarily for their mobile users who would have no UX problem.
Interesting how that hasn't made it into the discussion, I feel like people will just stop talking about it when the UX is fixed
Funny you should say that mobile users on Reddit have no UX problem with vertical videos. Here is how the above link looks like on my mobile device. Original link (to classic reddit UI), mobile version horizontal, mobile version portrait, respectively: https://imgur.com/a/JU4v3rn
The video has a full screen button which can be seen in your screenshots. Tap it and the video fills the screen in portrait mode on both the old reddit and the new mobile reddit, at least on my Android device.
I lol'd, I'm reading this on a vertical monitor right now. My secondary monitor is vertical due to cramped desk space, so I can have my horizontal monitor still centered when I look straight ahead.
Developers are a bit different in this regard. I used to use a vertical monitor in 2007 because, well, it's pretty great for big chunks of code and web development in general.
As good as it was, I never wanted to watch videos in that way.
I live about two blocks away. The lights dimmed and one of our breakers flipped. Then it got bad. My phone suddenly lit up, brighter than the night's electric blue sky, as everyone I've ever known called and texted to ask about what was going on.
Nothing interesting. Astoria is a pretty great neighborhood tho. We have a 24-hour fruit market next to another 24-hour fruit market.
United Brothers and Elliniki are similar, basically identical. I don't actually know the history behind it. Probably something like a CVS setting up shop across the street from a Walgreens.
United Brothers is interesting. It's an institution, but the family's that owns it makes their real money from real estate now. And apples. Good apples. Around October the apple barn next to the main United building is the best smelling place in NYC. $0.89/lb.
Was this at the Big Alice plant off of Vernon boulevard? I spent most of my life living across the river from there and it was such a quiet constant presence.
Not sure about the Big Alice nickname...this was at the ConEd substation that connects into the Astoria plant with the iconic four smokestacks that is across from Randalls Island.
Resettable breakers (partially) work on magnetic fields, so in theory a power surge at a transformer (massive coils) could generate a strong enough field. Just a guess
Magnetic fields fall by distance to the 4th power (more or less) and are effectively zero at distances greater than double the size of the magnet (the pole separation).
I.e. unless that transformer was stupendously large there's no way the magnetic field would reach a home 2 blocks away.
But I appreciate you at least trying to answer, so thanks.
I wonder how often these occur. When I was in my early 20s a buddy and I were about 18 hours in to a drive to Buena Vista, CO from Portland, OR, when a transformer exploded somewhere near us in a huge canyon. We thought it was noiseless nucleur explosion - the light was searingly bright and seemed to engulf everything. I just happened to call another friend (from a pay phone!) who had experienced the same thing. Even in my sleep deprived state it is to-this-day one of the most visceral moments of my life.
This happened to me once on a small street in Massachusetts.
I was driving at night and suddenly my heart jumped as a helicopter suddenly shined its bright spotlight straight at my car, like in the movies. It was hovering 20 feet off the ground about 200 feet away, and pointing straight at me.
After a second or two I realised the ‘helicopter’ was just my brain’s initial attempt to interpret what I was seeing. There was no helicopter, it was a transformer at the top of a pole that exploded.
The “spotlight” was not focused in any one direction but shining in all directions equally, so it was damn bright.
You hardly ever see anything so bright, which was why the “spotlight” thing made sense to my brain at first. And “helicopter” since it was up in the air.
It stayed lit for only a couple seconds and then the street plunged into darkness, all street lights off, as a few errant will-o-wisps sputtered out of the remains of the transformer.
I had this happen while working from home in SF. My office window faces the backyard and a transformer in front of my neighbors house went up.
No light show that I could see as it was early afternoon, but holy crap did the noise ever scare me. The window was open and it made this incredibly loud Bzzzzzz for about 10 seconds, then a small explosion. Took my brain about 20 seconds to connect the dots. See the smoking transformer helped.
I work on medium-sized power electric systems (mostly in the few hundred kW-range), and have a strong aversion to being anywhere near our systems during first power-up.
Hence, I always carry a couple of pushbuttons and some 15m of cable in my toolkit - wiring them in parallel with the buttons normally starting the show, retreating, saying a brief prayer to the patron saint of electricians and starting up.
Did a system on a ship a few years ago, all set, me sitting in the corridor outside the drive suite and pressing the button closing the main contactor, only to be greeted by the tell-tale sound of a door being blown off its hinges and an arc forming. Oh.
Cue incredible light show on the bulkhead opposite the drive suite door; after a second of this, I come to my senses and figure the so-called arc safe contactor -well- isn't.
I push the button jury-rigged to cut power at the generator end, only to have nothing whatsoever happen. Oh oh.
Still arcing. I key my VHF to alert the engine room to kill the generator set and alert them to the fire getting started in the drive suite, only to be told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet as they were busy with an emergency.
Seconds later, ship goes black (and eerily quiet!) before the sound of boots running down the corridor as the emergency lights kick in.
I've never felt as relieved as I did when the firefighting crew later told me that I'd been most unlucky - a pump starter in the drive suite (not our delivery) had opted out of existence and had sooted down all of my precious kit.
It had blown up the very same moment I tried to start my equipment for the first time - and for a few minutes I was certain I had contributed to taking an investment in the several hundred million dollar range off-hire for however long it took to replace the damaged electronics.
Instead, the crew apologised profusely for having me come all the way to the wrong side of the planet only to see my delivery go up in flames not of my own making.
Priceless.
I'll remember the sound, the light and the smell - not to mention that sinking feeling - to the end of my days, though.
When I was in college, I was leaning on the guy wire of a wooden power pole while chatting with a friend. I was rocking a bit, as I tend to do when standing still, and I noticed that the pole was swaying just a little too. So I tried bouncing the wire some more, and got several inches of sway out of the pole. Neat!
Then there was a loud POP and all the lights on the street went out.
Not sure what happened next, as it seemed like a good time to leave. Moral: don't do that.
I live in an older subdivision that has 18kW transformers on poles every hundred yards or so. We get a blowout once or twice a year during a storm. The arcs are smaller but oh man that 60Hz hum. It’s incredibly loud. Can’t imagine how loud that NYC arc was.
Even a little utility pole transformer can put on quite the show. Years ago, I saw one where the the transformer itself got ~vaporized. And then the arc started walking down the pole. Maybe the pole was old enough that it had some long cracks, that were damp enough to conduct well. Pretty soon, the entire pole was carbonized, and there was arcing all the way from the kV lines to the ground.
After a couple hours, they isolated the circuit, and shut it down.
How dangerous is that light? I know welding arcs contain a lot of dangerous UV light for example. It should be fine indirectly (clouds would let the UV pass or absorb it), but directly being exposed to it seems dangerous.
Directly observing an electrical arc can cause serious eye damage.
At close proximity, the huge amount of heat that can be produced by a high-current arc as well as the blast wave (known as arc blast) is much more dangerous, and can be fatal. It is a serious hazard for utility and electrical workers.
It's a good question. It depends on whether we're observing arc discharge or just combustion. If it's arcing, it could surely have a significant UV component. But I suspect this is burning copper or aluminum. HV transformers are filled with some kind of cooling oil, and I suspect that just has to burn off. If it were totally uncontrolled arcing, I'd guess there would be lots of reports of broadband interference that I haven't come across.
A spark’s RF interference isn’t limited to the frequency of the power supply. I don’t know the mechanism, but when I was a kid I found I could hold a lightswitch in a halfway state and hear the interference on the nearby FM radio. (Classic FM, so ~101 MHz compared to UK mains at 50 Hz).
It depends on how many excited elements are present that emit UV light. In general arc light is very dangerous to skin from close proximity due to very intense UV radiation per square inch. From afar it could still be dangerous to your eyes when looked at directly.
If you see bright light, duck and cover. If you go to the window, and it was some kind of a huge explosion, once the shockwave reaches, the windows
will shatter and you will
get seriously injuired.
I was probably two miles or so away in Manhattan -- there was no noise, no hit to the electricity, nothing. I was watching TV and then saw an otherworldly color sky out he window.
The actual source of the bright light was blocked by a building, so it looked a little like what I imagine the aurora borealis looks like. Then it started to rapidly change colors and flicker -- like fireworks, but without the noise.
In NYC, stuff happens all the time that is completely innocuous. There's an outdoor venue (Randall's Island) relatively nearby that often has music festivals. In the past few months I have had a very vivid light flashing outside that turned out to be from a construction crane about 8 blocks away; another time a red glow was from the lights of fire engines amassed on a neighboring street during an actual fire.
I mention this if only to say it is very easy to criticize someone's behavior in a situation like this after the fact, but when it is happening, the thought that this could be a huge explosion does not even register.
Ah, sorry - not
criticising, just reminding :) There was an article on HN recently on how important it is to follow this, and how life saving it can be.
If there is a flash and you hear no sound, it doesn’t mean it’s safe either - sound travels 300m/s, so if there was an explosion 2.5miles away, you would only see bright visuals on the sky, no sound, for the first 10-13sec, and then the shockwave would hit...
Once as a teenage (somewhere in the early 90s) I was watching a thunderstorm in suburban Sydney. I saw lightning strike (probably 5-10km) away, then a couple of seconds after the strike from about where the lightning hit, a blue 'bubble' (though with diffuse edges) rose (as though inflating) then fell/deflated over the course of a few seconds.
I've never gotten a good explanation for what it was, though this picture makes me think lightning struck an electricity sub station, caused a brief electrical fire which lit up the sky as it got more intense, then died off.
As I understand it, ball lightning is typical small; this bubble would have been in the order of 100m; also it was blue not white like ball lightning is typically.
I was a few miles away in Williamsburg walking outside when this happened. No line of sight to source because of the buildings. Just saw the clouds & sky turn orange and then bright blue and then it started flickering. Seemed to go on for a few minutes before it just faded away. My wife and I started to get concerned because we had no clue what it could be. I turned to Twitter and found out pretty quickly it was a transformer explosion, but there were about five minutes where we weren't sure what to do just caught out on the street.
LGA got shut down briefly because of the power outage. Amazingly, they had it back online in an hour. Which was great for us because we flew out of there this morning.
I was sitting in my living room in Williamsburg when I noticed the lights dim and saw the sky outside was a pulsating blue. It kept it up for what seemed like a couple minutes and I didn't hear any loud explosions, so I just assumed it was a film crew shooting a movie in the neighborhood.
In India transformers are build between houses, or on the street just outside houses, so you get some pretty interesting shots like this (happened at an apartment I used to live in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB2T_r9oVlI
Apparently ConEd now can apply to the Guiness Book of Records for largest arc light ever :-) I really enjoyed some of the twitter comments, "Astoria Borealis", "Amazon HQ corner stone", and "Somebody in Queens better have super powers after this!"
The event itself though is a really interesting example of 21st century phenomena observation. Much like the meteor over Chelyabinsk, so much video from a bunch of nearby cameras (dash cam's in Russia and smartphones in New York), it creates an amazing amount of raw data that people can sift through to try to figure out what is going on.
Someone with HV experience should probably know better, but I'm curious if the color is due to burning copper and/or aluminum. Copper salts used in fireworks burn at nearly this color.
It happens in Europe, it's just that you don't hear about it unless it has an impact.
For example this summer in Paris, a train station (gare montparnasse) was without electricity for 3 or 4 days because a transformer was on fire.
This page has a good diagram showing the difference between US and EU distribution systems - how the US has many small transformers vs the EU having few large ones, and how US customers get three-wire single phase vs EU three-phase
It also goes on to say "European systems need more switches and other gear to maintain the same level of reliability" so European utilities probably just spend their way to better reliability (burying power lines is one way to do that)
They do happen in Europe too. I actually expect something like at most one blackout per year.
I remember few years back an insane thunderstorm caused an "equipment failure" in the electrical infrastructure, and it manifested as a blackout. The blackout was somehow local and my mobile phone worked OK (though I could not charge it).
Generally any blackouts have been short, from tens of seconds to half an hour or so. No spectacular blue lights with aliens swarming in from the resulting dimensional rift.
It did raise thoughts of how highly vulnerable a modern society is to loss of electricity.
I mean, what if the lights went out and did not come back? (The Long Dark reference is intentional)
Were an EMP or something take place and fry electrical devices for good from a large ares, things would go bad and fast. The system impact would be massive.
There would be: no computers, no cars, no cell phones, no TV, no fridges or freezers. No digital clocks. No electrical heating. No lights. No deliveries to shops. No subway, no trains. No card payments. And so on. Eventually people would be out and rioting and stealing to feed their starving kids once a week or so had passed and any cupboard storages of canned beans and the like had been exhausted.
Distribution transformers (i.e. the small ones that serve homes or individual businesses) are run-to-failure components and they fail all the time. Most of the time, the failure is not as catastrophic as an explosion, because a protection system isolates the circuit and limits the amount of energy discharged through the fault.
For various reasons, it can be impractical or not economic to provide very sensitive, very fast protection schemes for distribution systems. An example would be single-wire Earth-return distribution systems which still exist in rural areas of the USA.
But rest assured, there are transformer failures on a daily basis all around the world.
In the UK we don't generally have transformers per home or business, but mainly larger ones that serve a few hundred homes, usually the size of a shed. I have seen one of those fail but it is not common.
And, I've never seen one in North America or anywhere else. It is a pretty rare event. I highly doubt that they happen significantly more often in one country or another. There are a lot of transformers in the world, however, and they sometimes fail for a variety of reasons. I hear about it often enough.
A while back a local (Netherlands) 25KV transformer caught fire and did about the same as this one only less and smaller until they cut off the power. It happens, but usually the power gets disconnected before any arcing can happen.
US power distribution is way more distributed than in Europe, in which everything is planned and centralized.
In the US there are transformers everywhere, you can see a house and a small transformer nearby.
In Europe they have this big monsters that cost several million dollars and require a train to move.
In Europe transformers in the city use to be underground and you won't see anything but a blackout of power.
It happened in Madrid some years ago.
Old transformers are very toxic as mineral oil with aromatic rings is burned,which is carcinogenic. New transformers use Hexafluoride SHF6 that are smaller, innocuous and easier to control.
But it cost a lot of money to update your infrastructure.
New York also has experimental superconductor lines.
The fluids were often polychlorinated biphenyls, which are nasty in their own right, and produce even worse things when thermally degraded, such as dioxins.
Driving home in the country when I was a kid, the sky lit up like daytime. Dad drove toward it - it was a power substation. He got out and asked a lineman nearby what was up, reported back to us "A raccoon got stuck across a transformer". Apparently it became the equivalent of a carbon arc searchlight, lasted for quite a while by my recollection.
Theft, mainly. A transformer is a big lump of copper, but even the oil is meaningfully valuable in a low-income country. There are reports of widespread transformer oil theft across Africa and South-East Asia. Draining a transformer of oil is easy, it'll earn you a few naira and it'll inevitably lead to the transformer burning itself out in spectacular fashion.
agreed, if they arrive on our doorstep we've already lost in a military sense, although as in War of the Worlds, maybe some of our microbial friends would come to the rescue
There were apparently some rumors circulating that the bright lights were the result of alien activity. The press event had some fun with those rumors. :)
What happens to the fluids in the transformer? PCB breaks down in very high heat, into much more benign things. Hopefully a long persistent arc helps make conditions right to get rid of a lot of it. Otherwise.. it's a nasty contaminated site.
Nowadays, large power transformers like those that would be found in a generating station or large substation are surrounded by an oil containment pit to prevent release of oil directly to the environment.
It was likely the electrical discharge through the nitrogen in the air (guessing arc discharge in this case); it ionizes the nitrogen, which emits blue light when it's subsequently de-ionized.
Yes, when a transformer fails spectacularly like this, there's often an electrical arc for a brief time, which is typically about as bright as lightning.
Every time something like this happens it's like "Oh, finally! The aliens! No earthly bullshit any more, all the people will unite to fight the common enemy or die a beautiful way..." and then just meh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp. These were used for a while before the incandescent bulb for street lighting. They aren't very power efficient. I used to work on one in a large projection system and I had to wear protective gear when changing the bulb because it could catastrophically explode.
BTW if anyone is interested in the voltage involved here, my friend works for ConEd and was on the scene. It was a 246kv step down transformer to 27kv. They have a lot of redundancy so it was fixed pretty quickly.
> There’s so much we don’t know about high voltages. I never understood why we don’t research it more. I guess too dangerous.
High voltage is quite well-researched. I'm sure there are experts who understand exactly what is happening here. We might not know the immediate cause of the explosion yet.
> Even a phenomenon like this. Could we use it for lighting a whole City for less power than streetlamps?
I'm a total layman, but it seems like the large majority of the light generated is wasted lighting up the sky instead of the ground. It's only producing as much groundlight as it is because there happened to be low clouds that night. That's why street lamps have reflectors above them to focus the light downwards. That's not even considering the amount energy wasted as heat.
Uh, well, for starters, you've got this blazing, uncontrolled discharge of energy, and it's just dumping tons of heat, untraviolet light and irregular magnetic force and radio transmission in all directions.
So there's a lot of waste and noisy interference being unloaded in all directions. In fact, it's so wasteful that it's dumping audible noise for miles beyond even the limits of its kinetic heat. Why waste that much energy? It's obviously costly to produce, no?
We don't even have a report on how much of the grid's juice went up in smoke. Certainly more than one hour of a 100 watt lightbulb. Maybe a megawatt hour? Maybe one hundred megawatt hours? An hour's worth of one hundred million lightbulbs? Not impossible.
And then, of course, there's the fact that night time is a good thing. All vertebrates sleep. All plants need a night cycle, for the dark phase of photosynthesis.
Sure, the city is this unnatural human social landscape, but, uh... I think the novelty of a constant high intensity electrical arc's discharge will wear off in about a week or less, for pretty much everybody, and nobody would want to live near it.
At first my TV blips, my spotify shuts down and outside you could see this very bright turquoise light all over the place. It was bright like it was a daytime just in the green blue color. At first I thought it must had been some fireworks nearby, New Year is coming, right? But there was no fireworks noise, no party noise, nothing, just this bright green lit city. I open the window and some lady in the building across me does the same and shouts 'wtf is that?!'.
I realize this was not a party and my brain starts spinning..
1. EMP attack, since the TV got affected 2. Asteroid or comet entering the atmosphere and messing up the magnetosphere 3. Strong solar outburst, causing some local aurora
I recently watched Robert Schoch's interview where he discussed huge solar outbursts at the end of last ice age and how the sightings of resulting auroras might have made it into ancient cultures.
[https://youtu.be/Vka2ZgzZTvo roughly at 21:00]
In the end I rushed to the rooftop, scared as f, and noticed this was just a transformer on fire at nearby power plant. Took a video, waited it out and went back.