Quote:
Originally Posted by CanisLupusArctos
It has been a long night of heavy wet snow sticking to everything, combined with wind picking up from the NW. This led to many trees and branches down. Around midnight I could see across the lake, to the south, as blue flashes lit up the night sky. Each one was a transformer exploding, representing a new power outage.
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I'm really not picking on you CLA,
but I'd like to offer a clarification to a common misconception. Transformers rarely explode. What you are seeing in a blue flash that lights up the sky at night during a snowstorm is the simultaneous connection or grounding together of 2 or 3 "phases" of primary power lines, usually caused by a tree or branch coming in contact with them. The "short circuit", if you will, can quite often be mistaken for an explosion due to the high voltage fault. The flash of light generated by this action is then magnified/transmitted through the moisture laden snow that is falling giving it a blue hue due to the water content.
The blue flashes generally happen in "threes". Most high voltage three phase primary power lines are connected to what is called a "re-closer", which means that the system will try automatically to re-energize itself should the fault have cleared itself in some way.(branches often burn off due to the high current). This happens three times until the re-closer "locks out" at which time, it takes a manual reset by a lineman from the power company.
As I type this, it occurs to me that I've said this before in a thread from previous years and for that I apologize.
Blue Thunder