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New York Sky Turns Bright Blue After Transformer Explosion (nytimes.com)
There was a boom; then a hum. The lights flickered. A giant plume of smoke filled the New York City sky, and turned it blue. From a report: "A sort of unnatural, fluorescent shade of blue," said Bill San Antonio, 28, who was watching Thursday night from inside a terminal at La Guardia Airport. "We thought it was a U.F.O.," said Yiota Androtsakis, a longtime Astoria resident. Ms. Androtsakis was not the only one. In the earliest moments, hundreds of Twitter users from across the city posted videos of the eerie lights, causing many on social media to fear an alien invasion.
By late Thursday night officials said the event was caused by nothing more than a transformer explosion. "No injuries, no fire, no evidence of extraterrestrial activity," the New York Police Department tweeted, adding later that the explosion was not suspicious. There was one Con Edison employee nearby when the fire started, and the authorities said he was unharmed. Still, Deputy Inspector Osvaldo Nunez, the commanding officer of the 114th Precinct, conceded that the episode "was spectacular." "You could see it from the precinct, and the precinct is about a half-mile away," he said. "You felt it in your chest, the explosions, and the night sky turned an electric blue."
By late Thursday night officials said the event was caused by nothing more than a transformer explosion. "No injuries, no fire, no evidence of extraterrestrial activity," the New York Police Department tweeted, adding later that the explosion was not suspicious. There was one Con Edison employee nearby when the fire started, and the authorities said he was unharmed. Still, Deputy Inspector Osvaldo Nunez, the commanding officer of the 114th Precinct, conceded that the episode "was spectacular." "You could see it from the precinct, and the precinct is about a half-mile away," he said. "You felt it in your chest, the explosions, and the night sky turned an electric blue."
A friend of mine who lives in Astoria posted a video and it looked like some real Ghostbuster shit.
There's a good roundup of videos of this event over on Deadspin.
https://theconcourse.deadspin....
By the way, if you go and search Twitter for #Qanon, you'll find that there are already NYC blue light truthers who are saying this is a message to patriots that the "hot war" is coming and that the acting attorney general (aka "117") is about to unleash holy hell on unbelievers and other liberals. Or, that it's a false flag. I'm not shitting you.
https://twitter.com/travis_vie...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The sky is blue?! Shit, gotta be aliens! /facepalm
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
And here I thought the M.I.B. had a city-wide neuralizer they can use.... Tsk tsk...
The blue was just arcing. As for damages most transformers are filled with mineral oil.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
bickerdyke
By late Thursday night officials said the event was caused by nothing more than a transformer explosion
They're more than meets the eye.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Well technically arcing releases a shitton of Ozone so you still shouldn't breath it in :-)
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue,
I know one: Air. When air ionises it turns blue. This happens during a lightning strike, and also happens during HV arcing. Oh and bonus points: It has nothing to do with compounds and everything to do with temperature.
That blue was not simply arcing
You sound like someone who has never seen arcing. ... Or a transformer fault for that matter.
there was clearly a significant amount of deflagration going on
Deflagration is a big word, you should look up what it means before using it.
Enjoy all those heavy metals and PCB's there New Yorkers
Transformers don't contain heavy metals, and even old transformers only have trace amounts of PCBs thanks to them being banned in the 70s and routine maintenance or breakdown maintenance replacing most of those components (especially the oil) in old transformers.
But this is NYC we're talking about. Even if it were PCBs, heavy metals, and your tinfoil hat which were vapourised it's probably an improvement over the air there anyway.
I hope it wasn't Bumblebee, or my son will be devastated.
Transformers don't contain heavy metals
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
and even old transformers only have trace amounts of PCBs thanks to them being banned in the 70s
Completely false, there are still old transformers with PCBs in them in the USA, and some of them are in the New York power system.
But this is NYC we're talking about. Even if it were PCBs, heavy metals, and your tinfoil hat which were vapourised it's probably an improvement over the air there anyway.
PCBs being pretty much the most toxic thing that we have in our cities, I'm guessing not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Transformers don't contain heavy metals
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
Not by any relevant definition of "heavy" eg toxic. There's a lot of iron and copper in these things I assume, but they aren't that horrible.
Or did you have some other definition in mind? There's lots to choose from with that term! %-P
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
... probably there were some?
Just saying :P
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why would aliens want to invade New York?
I reserve the write to mangle english.
I happen to have witnessed 2 different unrelated pole transformer explosions. In one case I was less than 150 ft / 50 m away, and in the second case it may have been 4 times that. I happened to be looking right at the second one when it happened, and there was a blinding blue flash. Both booms scared the crap out of me. I have also trained throwing a grenade (detonation maybe 30 ft away, behind a concrete wall). While the nearest transformer explosion was about 5 times further away, I would guess the energy at the point of the explosion was in the same ballpark (though the transformers don't produce shrapnel, thank goodness). The available fault current in the case of an electrical arc fault can be extremely high. I wouldn't want to be standing next to one.
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Harry Potter, you're needed
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Probably caused by a geomagnetic storm. Not a coincidence we just entered an area with fast moving solar wind on the 28th.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, this European research https://www.researchgate.net/p... seems to suggest that breakdown is mostly random, though for some reason I hear more about transformator explosions in New York than in Germany.
Modern transformers are filled with mineral oil. Historically, they were filled with more exotic chemical brews. There are many still in use that are filled with PCBs, which are definitely not good for the environment.
Sounds like a job for Sangamon Taylor.
Retreat! The goalposts are moving so fast!
ANY room temperature solid metal that is vaporized into a gas is dangerous to inhale what with the hundreds of degree temperature it will be.
Or are you trying to say it is solid and therefore not safe to inhale. Pretty sure all solids and most liquids are dangerous to inhale.
Anywhere left to retreat those goalposts to?
After all the crappy movies of Transformers being killed, are there any left to catch fire? Or was this one of those spontaneous fire things from the pile of their carcasses?
"causing many on social media to fear an alien invasion."
But in this Brave New Lazy World, diligent reporting means "I looked at my phone and saw those words, so it must be reality". Don't even bother to suggest that probably half are just tongue-in-cheek, and only a scant handful of might have experienced anything even approximating a "genuine fear" of alien invasion, and that those people were stupid and deserved their ignorant terror.
When journalism is indistinguishable from a well-below-average-IQ opinion, it is no longer journalism.
Or was this one of those spontaneous fire things from the pile of their carcasses?
No. This is what it looks like when Dr Manhattan from the Watchmen, farts.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Great cover story.
Never saw the night shining so bright / Then tried the switch on my flickering light / Blue skies way before dawn / Surge protectors from now on
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
Err no, not in the slightest. They have metals in them. Metals are heavy. That does not mean they have any heavy metals. Infact mostly they are copper, iron, wood, paper, oil, and all put in a steel box.
Completely false, there are still old transformers with PCBs in them in the USA, and some of them are in the New York power system [epa.gov].
Pointless reference. You're required to register any transformer which was made with PCBs in them to the EPA regardless if you've replaced the PCBs and regularly change the oil or not. Those would be on the list due to the potential for trace PCBs to leech out of insulation that remains. In fact those transformers on the list if the PCB content exceeds 0.05% an oil change becomes mandated. Also those transformers are registered since the disposal of their oil needs to be handled differently.
Good list though I can even see one of our transformers (which had its PCB containing components retrofitted 15 years ago) on it.
PCBs being pretty much the most toxic thing that we have in our cities, I'm guessing not.
No the most toxic thing you have in your city is FUD based on ignorance.
Iron and copper can be pretty horrible when inhaled
If you're close enough for iron and copper (not heavy metals) to be a problem for your lungs, then I suggest you get some SPF75 because the UV from that arc flash will be your biggest concern, right after the fact that you probably coped a significant amount of molten copper to your face. Mind you your concern will be short lived as the natural end a transformer scenario is a boil over. You can rest calmly as your burn alive thinking "at least I did not inhale".
U.F.O. Unidentified Flaming Object
Historically, they were filled with more exotic chemical brews. There are many still in use that are filled with PCB [wikipedia.org]s, which are definitely not good for the environment.
Transformer oil doesn't last forever. What they were filled with historically is not really relevant today. Pretty much every transformer on the EPA's PCB register only has trace amounts of PCBs which were retained in the insulation after the oil was swapped out and other PCB containing parts were remdiated, and a PCB value of 0.05% is grounds for throwing out otherwise good oil (though I haven't seen oil replaced due to hitting this value outside of an actual PCB remediation program).
The short of it you'd be hard pressed to find a transformer "filled" with PCBs anymore in a city.
In the earliest moments, hundreds of Twitter users from across the city posted videos of the eerie lights, causing many on social media to fear an alien invasion.
Whew! Good thing it didn't happen near us ignorant rubes out in flyover country. No telling what we might have thought!
Two transformers failed out. The typical result is a wave of extremely bright electrical arcs and lightning show until the circuit can be broken - in 2011, there was such an event in Fort Worth Texas for nearly half an hour --- anyone much closer to the transformers would likely have seen a much brighter blinding blue light that could do serious damage to the eyes b/c of the UltraViolet light wavelengths given off similar to an arc welder: there's your primary environmental hazard. I'm not sure why you're concerned about the smoke.
The short of it you'd be hard pressed to find a transformer "filled" with PCBs anymore in a city.
Except, possibly, for distribution transformers that have been in continuous operation for 40 years or more with no maintenance ever performed on them..... perhaps in some older building/elevator/other equipment installations.
If you have a working electrical utility --- you don't have a luxury of being able to simply shut off distribution every few years to maintenance all the equipment and change the transformer oil. It might be possible to service a power plant when other plants are still online - but as far as distribution equipment and branch transformers: people get upset when they lose power and the POCOs try to get things restored as quickly as possible ---- except if a transformer has failed, its unlikely to get attention: when was the last time your utility told you they were going to turn you off to check oil on the transformers for your block?
But this is NYC we're talking about. Even if it were PCBs, heavy metals, and your tinfoil hat which were vapourised it's probably an improvement over the air there anyway.
Bingo. The Arc is being seen a long distance away, so the bright bluish-white Arc flashes are being changed by the Air and crap that's already in the NYC air. Same reason the sky is not clear despite the light from the sun being white..... earth's atmosphere refracts the light and tends to reflect mostly the bluish hues back toward earth, and other wavelengths go into space.
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
No.... Transformers are made mostly of Copper and Iron.
Heavy Metals refers specifically to certain metals such as Antimony, Lead, Mercury, Lithium, Manganese, Cobalt, Nickel, Organotin, Cadmium, Arsenic, Chromium, and Thallium -- metallic chemical elements that have relatively high density, are toxic or poisonous at low concentrations, and which may have a tendency to bioaccumulate in some form.
Copper and Iron in the environment are not a major concern, because a high concentration is required for them to be acutely toxic --- you'd have to be WAY too close to that explosion.
The major environmental risk is from the bioaccumulation, since it means that ANY release of heavy metals into the environment can be a problem ---- because the effect of exposure to the poison is cumulative: even a small concentration in the air, soil, or water leads to higher concentrations in plants and animals, that accumulate through the food chain, and when a human eats an affected plant or animal, the metals build up in the fat tissue in the human body (including the brain) over time and never leave or reduce, thus causing the risk of a permanent poisoning.
This does not apply to the predominant metals in a transformer.
I was traveling westbound on the Long Island Expressway about 42 miles away (according to Google Earth), when I saw the sky in the distance light up with eerie blue-green flashes. It was quite the show.
It actually looked like an electric-blue mushroom cloud for a little while...
https://preview.redd.it/p3kzl6...
I am curious as to why the arcing lasted so long. Clearly this was a catastrophic fault where a couple of (very big) wires got too close and created a short circuit. Massive amounts of energy would about been used to maintain that arc. Should that have not tripped a circuit breaker or some other protection system upstream? or was the it as simple as the energy being consumed by the arc was similar to the normal load going through the transformer?
Anyone who has knowledge of high voltage distribution systems care to comment or provide a reference as to if this (apparent) lack of protection systems is normal or not, and in general what kind of protection systems are typically in place?
Heavy metal man, yea, you know bands like Metallica, Slayer Anthrax and Megadeth...
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
No.... Transformers are made mostly of Copper and Iron.
Heavy Metals refers specifically to certain metals such as Antimony, Lead, Mercury, Lithium, Manganese, Cobalt, Nickel, Organotin, Cadmium, Arsenic, Chromium, and Thallium -- metallic chemical elements that have relatively high density, are toxic or poisonous at low concentrations, and which may have a tendency to bioaccumulate in some form.
The term "toxic metals" would be a much more accurate term since "heaviness" really has nothing to do with it. Lithium, which is on your list is the lightest of all metals. Beryllium, is next lightest, and is one of the most toxic. Tungsten and bismuth, both quite heavy, are not especially toxic.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
In the future, denizens of New York City will refer to this as "The Incident", and some will deny that it ever happened.
Except, possibly, for distribution transformers that have been in continuous operation for 40 years or more with no maintenance ever performed on them.....
If you have a working electrical utility --- you don't have a luxury of being able to simply shut off distribution every few years to maintenance all the equipment and change the transformer oil.
If you can't take a distribution transformer offline for maintenance you don't have a "working electrical utility".
Every country I've ever worked in (I haven't been in the USA) has required N+1 radial feeds, ring-mains, or a combination of both at any meaningful distribution level precisely because in order to provide good reliable power maintenance is a must. This goes doubly for something as important as the grid connection of the power plant where some countries require N+2 capacity.
when was the last time your utility told you they were going to turn you off to check oil on the transformers for your block?
When was the last time they were required to inform you? Personally at home, I never got any notification. However I was connected to the same 33kV feed as my work where we received a "Notice of reduced reliability of supply" approximately once a month as the utility worked on some equipment somewhere between our 33kV incomers and the main 330kV feed to our city. It was my job to ensure we weren't doing either high risk work or work on our redundant incomers during these periods.
The place you may see some PCBs is in pole top transformers in the country, but a typical city distribution grid is easy* to route around with a bit of effort even if you don't have redundant equipment.
*The work is easy. Redoing fault and protection calculations when you find some maintenance job requires a makeshift bus-tie between two substations that was "value engineered" out during design is far less easy.
You're half right. What we need is more government regulation on the manufacture and installation of the hardware, not oversight into its day-to-day operation. A lot of people lost power because of this failed transformer, and if it was really old, some people *might* have been exposed to chemicals that would not be allowed in modern hardware, though whether that represents a significant risk or not is debatable.
Either way, this and other similar failures probably could be prevented with regular replacement of the transformers' oil so that the moisture content won't get too high, and almost certainly could be prevented with the addition of a fifty-cent dipstick sensor down in the transformer oil to continuously monitor temperature, moisture, and oil level, reporting back via BPL networking. Make such sensors a requirement in all new hardware, and over time, it will all get replaced as hardware fails (hopefully less spectacularly than this). Optionally, add a retrofit requirement for transformers big enough or old enough to cause serious problems.
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Just here to say thank. I don't come here often anymore and have no mod points, but I am glad to see knowledgeable people chime in on a subject instead of just armchair experts.
Silence is a state of mime.
Clearly this one an alien firefight. Theyâ(TM)re here. Theyâ(TM)ve been here for a very long time.
Isnâ(TM)t this how those coverup movies start?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Unless you're a bacterium. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you're close enough for iron and copper (not heavy metals) to be a problem for your lungs, then I suggest you get some SPF75 because the UV from that arc flash will be your biggest concern, right after the fact that you probably coped a significant amount of molten copper to your face.
Ah, Slashdot, the site where complete ignorance can get upmods. Copper fumes are toxic, and metals can remain in the air for surprising periods of time when burned. If you're on the other side of a solid wall (or hell, just a good piece of heavy black paper) the arc flash is a non-issue, but the copper in the air is still a problem.
Mind you your concern will be short lived as the natural end a transformer scenario is a boil over. You can rest calmly as your burn alive thinking "at least I did not inhale".
Here on planet earth, we have air. And that air has currents in it, which we often call winds. And those winds can carry toxic elements and compounds to other locations which are not where they were emitted. What color is the sky on your planet?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, Slashdot, the site where complete ignorance can get upmods. Copper fumes are toxic [medlineplus.gov], and metals can remain in the air for surprising periods of time when burned. If you're on the other side of a solid wall (or hell, just a good piece of heavy black paper) the arc flash is a non-issue, but the copper in the air is still a problem.
Yeah and if you're close enough to breath them in during a transformer fire in the open air, then you're already dead. That's not ignorance, that's you just completely missing the point. Copper fumes are a problem in an enclosed building, think switchboards arcing out. Copper in the air from a transformer fire is not a problem for anyone who isn't already electrocuted, burnt, currently already on fire, or about be.
Here on planet earth, we have air. And that air has currents in it, which we often call winds.
Amazing thing about currents, they have this great ability to dissipate pollutants down to pointless levels. Speaking of currents have you ever seen an arc flash vapourise copper. It has this amazing ability to generate a current of its own, straight up into the air thanks to the high temperatures involved. If you're not sitting in an enclosed room you can take a nice deep breath, you won't be breathing any copper that is even remotely relevant to your health.
But you are right about one thing, there's a lot of ignorance on Slashdot. Maybe look up the number of people who died during electrical incidents due to chemical poisoning sometime. Hint, a double amputee can count it on his fingers.
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue,
I know one: Air. When air ionises it turns blue. This happens during a lightning strike, and also happens during HV arcing. Oh and bonus points: It has nothing to do with compounds and everything to do with temperature.
The nitrogen in the air arcs blue-white. Green comes from ionized copper.
Amazing thing about currents, they have this great ability to dissipate pollutants down to pointless levels.
No, they don't. They tend to carry things along together.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"