Electrical explosion, sparks light up Kenner sky 110,704 views
•Dec 27, 2018
Ymani Cricket wrote:
“I have heard of some weird crap like this but not quite this weird. What the actual he!!??!? Fireballs - roving electric impulses??
Crazy
“
Found an answer on that thread:
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Kaecillian
Kaecillian
@Kaecillian
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5 likes
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45m
@sAMAZEing Electric surge running through cables not designed to carry that high of a voltage. Going from electric pole to electric pole. This can happen to the electrical cables inside the walls of your house. It’s how many house fires start. That’s why it’s important to have the correct circuit breakers, since they will prevent this.
Power lines being blown together drawing arcs. Safety cutouts should have tripped quicker. Note they finally did the block around the gas station.
What was crazy is being out in a wind like that. Has a neighbor once decapitated by a sheet of corrugated steel when I was a kid.
Regarding the electrical phenomenon - the arcing and sparking. Here’s my theory, having been in the power industry for longer than the newest freepers have been alive....
The fireballs appear to be following distribution lines as they span from pole to pole. My thought is that 2 or 3 phases are touching one another, resulting in a short circuit (basically, a very high amount of current flowing, which results in lighting up the sky and a fireball as seen).
Now, usually, when 2 lines touch one another, or when 1 wire falls to the ground, a circuit breaker upstream, either pole-top or back at the source substation senses the extraordinarily large amount of current (along with possibly, a voltage drop) and trips the circuit breaker to prevent damage to equipment and to protect the public. There is also a mechanism where the circuit breaker will automatically close (turn back on) a couple of times before it locks in the tripped position. This is because most short circuit “faults” are caused by lightning or branches falling across the line (or errant squirrels) - transient in nature, and clear within a couple of seconds.
What appears to have happened in this video is that there is a short circuit or fault on the line, but the circuit breaker upstream has failed to trip, either due to incorrect settings of the current-sensing relay scheme or the breaker doesn’t work properly. So the fault lingers and travels along the lines, resulting in a persistent fireball and lots of loud AC hum.
What should happen when a distribution line breaker fails to trip for a short circuit, is that a time-delayed overload protection scheme on the main station transformer should, within a couple of seconds, sense the overload and trip the entire station bus, including other feeder lines that come out of the station.
Neither seems to have happened in this instance, or at least not very quickly. I would hope that somebody in the utility company is taking a really hard look as to why this did not happen.