Did anyone just see that? It was around 11:52pm, I'm round 20km east of the CBD, the electricity dimmed for around 3 seconds and the sky turned light blue in a flash. It happen twice, about 5-10 seconda apart. What was it?
Electricity dimming and sky turning blue in Melbourne
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king_panther
Gettin' tanked
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Marty McFly dropping by for a visit?
Tom
Leaving Skid Marks
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I was just told last night at how those big power boxes things can explode, lifting high in the air and flinging off and exploding!
Sounds pretty crazy either way!
Anyone got any idea what it was?
Sounds pretty crazy either way!
Anyone got any idea what it was?
Definately not a transformer - when a TF Fails it fails in a big way, but most arcing is contained within the tank.
The blue flash would've been conductors arcing together, and given that it lasted 3 or so seconds, it would have been at distribution voltage of 11kV or 22kV
The reason it happened again 5 seconds later is that the feeder/line would have auto-reclosing on it. This means that when there is a fault, the protection de-energises the feeder, waits 5 seconds then tries to re-energise. If the fault is still there (which it is in this instance as second blue flash) it will trip and lockout.
Given you acutally saw the arc, i'm guessing some smartass kid/loser threw some chain over the powerlines, or some other metal object which has tangled up. The force of the short circuit is usually enough to clear any other objects such as tree branches etc, but in this case sounds like something is actually tangled/attached to the overhead lines.
(PS I'm a protection engineer in the electricity transmission industry thus the long explanation )
The blue flash would've been conductors arcing together, and given that it lasted 3 or so seconds, it would have been at distribution voltage of 11kV or 22kV
The reason it happened again 5 seconds later is that the feeder/line would have auto-reclosing on it. This means that when there is a fault, the protection de-energises the feeder, waits 5 seconds then tries to re-energise. If the fault is still there (which it is in this instance as second blue flash) it will trip and lockout.
Given you acutally saw the arc, i'm guessing some smartass kid/loser threw some chain over the powerlines, or some other metal object which has tangled up. The force of the short circuit is usually enough to clear any other objects such as tree branches etc, but in this case sounds like something is actually tangled/attached to the overhead lines.
(PS I'm a protection engineer in the electricity transmission industry thus the long explanation
)
VR4sum
Leaving Skid Marks
That's awesome Brad!The more I think about it, the more I realise how correct you are, I mean WHAT ELSE could it have been?
Seriously?
- actually, do you think there are now two Marty's in our current time or was that him coming and going really quickly?
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You didn't see anything, sir.
- Location
- ormeau@gc.qld.au
- First Name
- Matt :)
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- 1963 Toyota Lite-Stout & 2007 Toyota Blade Master G
Ed Zachary