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Transformers! More than meets the eye!
May. 13th, 2005 06:48 amSo Z and I are sitting around on the couch last night around 11:30, her watching Discovery Health, me reading the latest US release of Trigun Maximum, when there's this extremely bright flash outside, a loud pop followed by an equally loud short-out buzzing sound, and the power in the house dies. We were in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm, but this definitely was not lightning or thunder. We looked out the window just in time to see the transformer on the electric pole across the street explode into a shower of sparks. Thank God it had been raining (and a torrential rain at that), because that quickly extinguished the hot metal fragments shortly after they hit the ground. After taking a quick inventory on candles, we started getting the house lit up again... and a few minutes later, the power came back on...
...just in time for another blinding flash of light, shorting sound, and resulting power outage. By this time, the remains of the transformer were incandesing/burning on the pole. A few moments later, there was a third massive short out, and then it was silent. We waited for about another 30 minutes or so to see if power would be restored, but no dice. We blew out the candles, pulled in both dogs to sleep in the bedroom with us (which made for uncomfortable sleep at best), and drifted off to sleep.
Around 4 AM this morning, everything came back on again, so it appears that they've re-routed the grid around the dead transformer, and other than a brief-but-loud short-out buzz around 5:15 ot so, everything's been working fine. Definitely made for an interesting evening, though. Between the extremely close lightning we had and the exploding transformer, we had quite the show.
...just in time for another blinding flash of light, shorting sound, and resulting power outage. By this time, the remains of the transformer were incandesing/burning on the pole. A few moments later, there was a third massive short out, and then it was silent. We waited for about another 30 minutes or so to see if power would be restored, but no dice. We blew out the candles, pulled in both dogs to sleep in the bedroom with us (which made for uncomfortable sleep at best), and drifted off to sleep.
Around 4 AM this morning, everything came back on again, so it appears that they've re-routed the grid around the dead transformer, and other than a brief-but-loud short-out buzz around 5:15 ot so, everything's been working fine. Definitely made for an interesting evening, though. Between the extremely close lightning we had and the exploding transformer, we had quite the show.
