Who's in Phoenix?

OK which one of you caused this???


PHOENIX LIGHTS: Mysterious Light Flashes During Traffic in Phoenix?! - YouTube

You guys are the first thing I thought of.

Kevin

Judging by the intensity and duration of the flash, its either a camera flash or a pole pig shorting out.

Before you say its too bright to be a camera flash, look how bright the car headlights are due to the night vision camera.

WTF :thinking:
It wasn't me for sure

Jim

I was scared for a second because I was at South Mountain in SOUTH Phoenix earlier today with a 500mW 635nm'er and I dropped it while sky pointing... it's fine, but the beam did pass onto the street (fortunately, it would have been far too diverged to cause damage - a few thousand feet away).

Must have been a slow news day. lol

Thats night vision, so even a large light blowing out could have looked like that. Especially if humidity, pollen, or other particles were present.

Looked like an electrical flash like Hydro pole power lines
shorting out... If the short blew itself out in a short time
there would be no interruption of service... just a power
glitch or quick brownout on the line... :undecided:

Jerry

They said in the clip there were no problems reported.

Yeah... I heard that it was not a transformer and they had
no indicators go off...(problems reported)

If the short is fast enough and corrects itself they may not
get a Danger/Warning signal of a problem.
Like maybe a small branch from a tree fell across the lines.

There must be lots of small self corrected shorts happening
all the time.


Jerry

That would be a big short.

Maybe a squirrel got his nuts toasted.

Tech_Junkie said:

That would be a big short.

Maybe a squirrel got his nuts toasted.

Click to expand...

Those would be BIG nuts....:crackup:

Jerry

Maybe it was one of these...:crackup:

Thats a 14 or 35 Kv short. A big three phase pole pig went boom. Practice is not to admit when it happens, least the power company find themselves paying for whatever attached gear just got fried. Since they are self insured, they do not often admit when this happens.

Its not fun when your building is powered by a "BAT"*and they pop. Where I used to work, the whole university campus was on one big "BAT" and when it or the oil filled underground HV lines went, I usually ended up with 2000-5000$ of repairs in my lab alone. This averaged once a year with our overloaded BAT. One year that BAT blew and it took down our whole building's systems and loads, and fried a bunch of 70 HP air conditioning motors. The Insurance paid, but we lost two weeks of work, lots of instruments, and all the sample refridgerators quit.

Ever smelled ten pounds of whale blubber that has rotted for two weeks? You do not want to smell rotten whale blubber. Its far worse then raw, rotting, deep sea squid. We did for months, afterward. The building became a HAZMAT forrest. That smell and the weeks of downtime got us distributed transformers.

*BAT = BIG A$$ed Transformer... Going the way of the DoDo in the US, thank God.


Steve

Yeah...
That makes sense. Why open yourself up for claims and law suites...

Good old DENIAL....


Jerry