Added: 4 years ago
From: erikdravn
Views: 161,724
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  • You should have seen how close you could get to it without touching it, better yet do it with a friend the one who gets the closest wins!! :)

  • That's CRAZY! I have always wanted to see what that looks like.

  • @MikeysRC Glad you liked it. Yeah, it was quite intense. You can't get a sense of the brightness of it from the video. It scared the ground quite well, making volcanic glass out of the rocks and minerals. I have some awesome pics of the scar after. Was the first of 3 events that summer. Wild! Thanks for commenting.

  • @usernameABCDXYZ I have powerlines go down near my house and the ground is scorched and there is a shiny rock like substance on the ground. Happy now.

  • WTF go stomp it out!

  • Get a stick and some marshmallows you idiots!

  • Just use tape to fix it hey it will get the job done

  • thats about 20,000 volts with really high amperage, dont mind my technical talk

  • nothing some hot glue wont fix

  • I was driving down the road the other day the minute one of those transformers blew and a wire dropped 10 feet from my car on the other side of the road so I slammed on the breaks and nearly shat my pants. People have no idea how loud and powerful those lines are cause that wire was bouncing left/right/up/down and I was sure I was gonna die. Then I realized how stupid it was to park my car in the middle of a road by a downed powerline and I gased it the hell out of there. VERY SCARY stuff.

  • This just happened to me today. The street was flooded from rain and RIGHT in front of my house my neighbor was getting out of her car then lighting struck a pole and wire fell down and 1 inch before she jumped back in her car a wire went between the door as she tried to close it. so there was a live wire 10 inches from her in the car.

  • That right there is enough voltage and current to immediately turn out your lights, boys and girls... lol

  • what was that rancid purple line on the beginning of the vid?

  • @110491Banter It's a lens flair from the brightness effecting the camera. You can't really get an idea how bright it was from the video. But, it was extremely bright.

  • @110491Banter It's not a lens flare. CCD cameras produce characteristic horizontal or vertical lines when they're overloaded. Each line or column of the display is a "bucket brigade" structure that is shifted out when read, and when it's overloaded the excess electrons literally spill sideways along that structure.

  • @110491Banter It's a directed energy weapon being used by Organized/Gang or "Cause" Stalkers.

    LOL. ;-)

  • ... nice. You're half-way there; It's wet! So-oo, fill 'em water balloons with vinegar, salt and water... And bombard that snappin', poppin' li'l wanker 'till it 'SPLODES! Get-it-ANGRY!! And bomb it all the more!!!

  • touch touch

  • that'll sell that house...

    /watch?v=sdcGGsbBRvQ&feature=r­elated

    pass it on :)

  • how did this happen?

  • @jro9001 It was caused by a whopper of a storm. The thing is, it was the first downed line of a string of 3 events that summer. It was a wild summer.

  • don't let al gore see this...he'd be pissed.

  • Nothing like a good arc! Nice video :-)

  • Get closer to it you pussies!

  • that has got to be the biggest arc welder in the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    

  • 911 was bad.

  • some intense welding going on over there...

  • @mr7confused

    LOL :D

  • lol the house says for sale

  • So pretty. Must touch.

  • If I was there I would be playing with the arcs

  • I wouldn't go anywhere near it even with the power off.

  • Awesome. I could watch that shit all day.

  • nice... looks like your utility needs to be doing some upgrades

  • the voltage gradient of the ground surrounding that wire is deadly for sure.

  • Damn recloser

  • damn! no marsh-mellows!?

  • Moderately interesting video. A comment on the comments: lots of humorous invitations to pee-on, or play-with, or roast-marshmallows-on, the electric arc. Cute, but I can't resist adding, for the benefit of children and the uninitiated: DOWNED POWER LINES ARE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT GET WITHIN 1000 FEET OF THEM. THEY CAN KILL YOU EVEN DOZENS OF FEET AWAY, DUE TO GROUND ELECTRIFICATION, SO KEEP AWAY. Now, if you go pee on an arc and get maimed for life, don't say I didn't warn you.

  • Hey, its a perfect and fun death if your depressed and wanting to commit suicide! At least the neighborhood dogs won't be starving for a few days.

  • @xsasukaxuchihax : Yes, if one is feeling suicidal (say, because of guilt; perhaps one has just committed a murder), then self-execution via power line would be one way to handle it. Who needs electric chairs or gas chambers? Just go grab a live wire. I've known persons who could have benefited from that. One such person stabbed a close friend of mine to death with an 8-inch French chef's knife. He got 5 years in jail. Sigh. He should have grabbed a wire instead.

  • @lonewolfintj No, he should've simply grabbed a powerline, cut it and blew the house up. That way he wouldn't have gone to jail.

    By the way, I love your grammar...it isn't all "blab blabity blah blah blah"

    ...LOVE IT!!!!!

    Ha, I'm so easy to impress.

  • @xsasukaxuchihax : Yes, I wish the fellow had offed himself by grabbing a 345KV wire BEFORE murdering poor Michelle. She was about 21 at the time. Her ex boyfriend came over to her house uninvited, got into a squabble with her, grabbed a knife, and stabbed her to death. Tragic waste. I went to her funeral. I cried. But why blow up her house? Nah, he should have broke into a substation and fried himself on a concrete slab. Easier for the Edison guys to scrape up the mess afterward. >:-)

  • @lonewolfintj Okay, well if you wanna be epic about it... he should've just dived into a river with the highest voltage on Earth and got fried! And then light the River on fire (Gasoline) and then iced over and then melted and thena thousand knifes stuck into the water and then iced over and then metled and then turds smeared all over his face and then iced over and then melted and then chop the head and balls off and then iced over and thrown into space!! NEVER TO RETURN!

  • @xsasukaxuchihax : Well, yah, but you gotta get nuclear weapons involved in there somewhere. Get the Russians to blow him up with Tsar Bomba! That's a really HUGE nuclear weapon, 100 megaton, bigger than anything the US has developed. (Search for "Tsar Bomba" on YouTube.) Not even his atoms may survive! He gotta be totally OWNED!!!!! >:-)

  • @lonewolfintj Oh, well then blow him up with random nuclear weapons and then throw him in space!!!! >:D

  • Ummm, no. It's not spraying gang graffiti on the walls of local businesses, is it?  Around where I live, some of the just-landed aliens (mostly from Mexico) do undesirable things like that. But they don't really emit bright light and loud humming and fizzling noises. (Except when they try stealing copper from substations they thought, wrongly, to be decommissioned. Then they spit flames and end up in a hospital bed or on a morgue slab.)

  • now pee it out! Nah just kiddin'... great footage!!!

  • @SmashCOBamberg Light a fire, then pee it out. Don't like it? Kiss my rump, now for a second lets all do the bump!

  • What in God's name is he DOING?!?

  • @ReverendSyn Is who doing? :o

  • thats how i keep the teens of my yard

  • Nope, it's how we keep the kids off of our lawns in the US.

  • @XtremeMachinez see that big laser going through it? Thats for if a kid dares to go through it it will laser the kids legs off O.o

  • I'm curious, why do you say that you can't have downed power lines in Germany? Surely they use some above-ground lines in Germany? Are you saying your power poles/lines are so awesome Aryan super-mensch that they're impervious to high winds? I don't buy it. A gale will bring them down, and they'll be fizzling in the street, in Germany as in USA or UK or Zimbabwe or Kyrgyzstan or wherever. Power is power, and when the wire hits the ground, it arcs, anywhere in the world.

  • it cant happen in germany because our power lines are underground. :P only the big powerlines that come directly from the power plants are upperground but they are huge and i didnt ever hear such a line came down.

  • No overhead power lines in all of Germany? Now, why do I find that hard to believe?  Have you scrutinized every street in every city, town, and village? No, that would take you 1000 lifetimes. So how can you know? You can't. Let's do a google image search.... :::googles::: In 5 seconds I was able to turn up dozens of images of medium-voltage above-ground power lines in residential neighborhoods in towns such as Dresden. In short, you're full of shit.

  • of course we have overhead power lines but they are very rare and mostly used by tramcars especially in east germany. where btw dresden is located. but in normal towns and villages we have underground power lines almost every where

  • I had that happen next to my house during the ice storm last winter! (I'm in upstate NY)

  • that happened 10 years ago near our house. The pavement was crystallized where the wire touched it.

  • go pee on it

  • @ironmaiden12343 very good idea ;)

  • @ironmaiden12343 LOL OUCH

  • @ironmaiden12343, go pee on it, yea right, you be the 1st, then we will follow XD

  • @ironmaiden12343

    Why don't we put you IN an "Iron Maiden" and you can touch it, I'm sure nothing bad would happen!

    (If by chance, you listen to Iron Maiden and don't know what an physical "Iron Maiden" is, shame on you, you're a poser!)

    (I'll give you a hint, it's not a metal female robot!)

  • @ironmaiden12343 Chuck Norris does every day...

  • i think it is a good time to call the fire fighter

  • The fire you see is not really, it comes from the electricity. Once the circle is broken, the fire go out. I am a fireman in Belgium, and here isn't it our task to, but that of the electricity company which have there own extinguishers if the fire doesn't stop automatically. For larger cases, we extinguish the fire offcourse (but only when the power is off) (srry for my bad english)

  • And what´s the matter with the power? Water does fade away the fire. Only that matters.

  • That's an electric arc, not a fire. Note that the arc is in the middle of a water puddle? And that the water is making it worse, not better? First call the power company and tell them lines are down, so they can shut off the juice. Then, perhaps, call the fire department if something is on fire. But in this case, you're dealing with a water puddle, and water puddles aren't exactly super-flammable.

  • looks like your neighbours house is for Sale... ah and nice video with the power thing by the way ;)

  • For a significant current to flow I'd have to have at least 5000v accross my rubber soled shoes. For that to happen I'd have to be standing less than 10 feet from the fallen line. At that distance I'd be more worried that the arc would "Jacob's ladder" up and directly strike me. So this ground current worry is just a scare tactic.

  • @BenHutchinson1 : Power lines can carry up to 345KV in USA. Rubber shoes wouldn't help even if they were dry. And in rainy conditions (such as in this video) your shoes would be wet and wouldn't provide any insulation at all. And no, ground electrification is not a "scare tactic"; it is very real and has killed many people. So if you value your life, don't get within 100 feet (at the very closest!) of downed live power lines.

  • @lonewolfintj

    Well the wire might be at 345kv. But the ground even 10 feet away would be much lower (like maybe 5kv) and rubber powerline worker boots would protect against that. At 20 feet, it would be lucky to be over 1kv. And ordinary rubber soled tennis shoes would protect against that. If it were the more standard in-city voltage of 10kv on the line it wouldn't be over 1kv on the ground at 3 feet away. The problem at that distance is the arc can Jacob's Ladder up and get big and zap you.

  • wennie roast!

  • what if it happen to be right on a gas line i know there burried deep but it could happen

  • yeah, u r totally right, where is the hell the protection system? a breaker should have tripped already, 2 or 3 hours of fault current!!!

  • a downed power line creates the same environment as an arc welder and the light from anything with an arc welding effect such as a downed power line causes s purple or similar color line on the video. just like an arc welder a downed power line can hurt your eyes.

  • i want to see the aftermath

  • Do not look at the arc!

  • i dont know why the breakers didnt trip... what company is supplying ur hydro?

  • Time to test the cage of Faraday

  • Oh the irony of the forsale sign, that's good.

  • That isn't even remotely ironic.

  • You have to look away from the fore to see the irony in it...but yeah bad joke

  • lol 2-3 hours? didnt you call the power company?.... waste of energy.

    Uhhmmm wonder Why all the vids in youtube with electrical arching have this Violet vertical line in the camera...

  • camera sensitivity... its too bright

  • what did it smell like?? lol

  • Y didnt u call the power company and have them shut it off?

  • I agree.

  • In my city, which is really new, ALL power and cable lines are under ground. Safer and looks nicer.

  • have you seen one bevor? ^^

  • it's only 7000 volts :)

  • Music man, yeah, but it's the amps that kill you.

  • incoming terminator

  • oh lets play with it,,, please

  • woah lets go touch it!

  • DO NOT TOUCH THIS! Not only will it KILL YOU! You will be in agonizing pain the whole time! LOL

  • duh were not stupid

  • yes... you are. have a nice day and make sure you put your helmet on before you go outside to play, you dont need anymore concussions.

  • There was this huge storm once that struck the local warning siren post. It started to sound the sirens like hell, for a couple hours, with the storm enraging around too, and everyone who had recently watched "War of the World" were really spooked. Duh, everyone was spooked. Everyone was like "THE RUSSIANS ARE INVADING", lol

  • rename this downed UFO you'll get more views (and more hate mail) : )

  • c0c0asauce ur a dick hed mate dont dribble shit

  • this happened in front of my house and i walked over to touch it(i was 5)..good thing i got distracted by a poodle.

  • Well, I would consider that you're lucky that you got distracted by a oodle or else you will be paralyzed or dead right now

  • FIERCRAKER

  • popcorn!

  • yeah fireworks

  • AN ACT OF TERRORISM! THIS IS TERRORISM! TERRORISTS! AL QAEDA! Thats what the national news would be telling us if they covered this story. lol

  • im guessing thats not sposed to happen

  • you are right!

  • if you really very close to it you get shocks very bad

  • Anyone have marshmellows?

  • If this happens to you and you are near this downed line the best thing you can do is put both feet next to each other. Because {{{and this is true with LIGHTING}}} The Current is moving through the ground so if you have you feet spread apart or you are on the ground the current will go up the leg that is closest to the downed and come down the other leg and then your dead. That is why they say don't lay on the ground during a storm. So make yourself a small target by keeping your feet close.

  • usually you call your local fd or energy company so something stupid funny dont happen like the 5 yr old boy cross the street getting zaped lol

    usually...

  • noooo

    whay like that

    you need to disconect the 2 wayer from eatch other thats power wayest

    sorry for the english

  • i had one downed in front of my houseand it was fall too so all the leaves cought on fire

  • don't forget to mention that we still say 120V

    and 220V despite that being wrong

    and in America, larger appliances do use 220V

  • This is probably a primary that went down. That's 7,500 volts 60Hz. We had a tree come down on one and the wire was frying the tree and itself until the wire snapped and the tree fell to the ground.

  • If you walk in the street, around this "burn", because the floor seems wet, you'll fell your legs rumbel xD

  • Very Good Tip!

  • someone should lick that..

  • So you agree with me. I made that comment because someone said "That's 60Hz!" Well.. duh..

  • "shit i knew i shouldnt of ran crysis at highest setting on my 3 year old lap top"

  • lol nice

  • That's no way to get rid of gophers,LOL.

  • Hey Wait! thats a great idea!

  • That is bad ass, 2 to 3 hours!!

  • OMG well that's one way of digging a hole lol!

  • But didn't that arc have to call 8-1-1 first?

  • i would hate to have been walking under that when it fell to the ground lol

  • It would be funny if some viewers of the for sale property next to his house came to see it whilst this was happening..

  • i want to see the after marks

  • i think it was because some one download too much porn in you town :P

  • nice lol

  • uuumm wasnt me*whistles*wipes harddrive*

  • the porn was not mine...at all.....whatsoever....nope

  • wow engineer didnt do a very good job in sizing the fuses!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • this is one hell of a welding machine haha :D

  • That's 60 Hz.

  • Everything AC is 60 Hz. That's why we call it AC.

  • I love the sound the 50hz hum, The whole lot of it BBBzzzzzzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzmmmmmmz­mzmzzzz

  • 8===D :)

  • U should go pee on it...

  • ZzzaaApppP!!!!!

    FUCK! you son of a bitch!

  • After a severe storm in Missouri, a downed powerline started arcing to a car parked 2 houses down from me. the irony is that the car was an Mercedes SLK55 AMG!

  • What's ironic about that? If it had been a Tesla Roadster...

  • LOL that's a good one :D

  • Happy this shit wasn't my house

  • Instant fulgurite.

  • sand/dirt that is melted into glass due to extreme electrical heat?

  • Not enough current to shut down that primary.

  • A residential ticket does not qualify you for HV work. Since you do work in the "field" you should still know better. Where I'm from a couple of kids threw a section copper pipe onto a substation; Both were nearly killed by the arc. One suffered 3rd degree burns to most of his body; he is now disfigured from the face down and cannot speak well because his face and jaw area were burned so bad.. His life will be a painful reminder of what 3 minutes of stupidity can do.

  • I see that if you got close to it and tried to place a pipe on the wires, it would arc the pipe. But if they threw it, it shouldn't have arced to them. How close were they standing when they through it? I'm guessing they were closer than 10 feet (considering both the voltages and currents involved at a substation). If I did it, I would have thrown it from AT LEAST 20 feet away. First I wouldn't, because it is vandalism. But second, I wouldn't be so stupid to stand to close.

  • It sounds to me like the kids got what they deserved for their stupidity.

  • You can get electrocuted just standing near a downed power line. That current is spreading out through the ground in all directions producing a voltage gradient. Same with lightning, you can get killed just standing on the ground near where lightning strikes.

  • How does the current spread through the ground? I have always been baffled by this. I thought current just wanted to get TO the ground. So WHY would the current keep flowing THORUGH the ground once it got there?

  • Electricity doesn't just reach a spot on the ground and vanish- the ground is a relatively poor conductor so it defuses throughout it like water defusing through a sponge. And because the ground is a poor conductor it's resistance (ohms) causes a voltage drop to occurs as it flows- so if you are standing on the ground you are standing across that voltage drop. Even though it's a small fraction of the total voltage it could be enough to be lethal.

  • Here is a question that maybe a high voltage electrician or engineer could answer. If the line-to-ground voltage is 7500 Volts then what is the voltage difference between a point 20 feet away from the line and a point 21 feet away from the line (a physical distance of one foot with the closest point being 20 feet from the line)? I know that on a perfectly dry day it would be different than on a rainy day. So could you give me some kind of estimate on this.

  • That would be almost impossible to estimate. It would depend on many factors such as the composition and moisture content of the soil and the proximity and direction of the various power company grounds. The circuit neutral is connected to ground at each pole and each service drop. The fault current will flow to each of these in inverse proportion to each path impedance. Suffice to say it's just a bad idea to be anywhere near a fallen power line- especially barefoot or with wet shoes.

  • yeah you can't calc that unless the conductivity of the soil is known. But you can be sure that from point 0 to some point far away, the potential approaches 7500V !

    HA!

    So stay the hell away!

  • Actually the voltage doesn't kill ,the current kills. So the question becomes, How much current will flow through the ground UNDER me versus how much will flow throught the "detour" which is right TROUGH me? Well lets assume that the voltage is 12000 volts from the power line. Then assume that the voltage is only a fraction of that accross my legs, maybe 500v. With my rubber soled shoes, 500v will push such a pathetically small current through me, that I won't feel a thing.

  • This really disturbs me. it should not have burned that long especially since there appears to be nothing that is keeping it from going to ground. What I take from this is,

    A: This company or coop cannot afford to place reclosers on lines at proper distances.

    B: The line fuse was replaced with one that was to big for this line. The second one is probably the more probable cause. That line should have been locked out within 30 secs of it hitting the ground.

  • Your right on the money friend.

  • You are right. I dont live in the US, but I can say about the fuse that we dont know the resistivity of the ground in this specific case, it might have been too high to allow high current during the fault, not making it high enough to fuse the fuse.

  • turning the dirt to glass. Not bad

  • We had something like that happen in front of our house exept the lines were jumping there are about three hole one is abot one foot wide and 5 inches deep the other is a bit smaller then there is one on sidewalkand the sidewalk around here has sand in it so all around it is a green colored glass and theres a hole the with of the wire and i suck my finger down it to see how deep it was and i cant feel the bottom the power of those things are amazing

  • Eek, please avoid throwing *anything* over the high voltage (always the highest lines)! I know because I work for the utility.. not only can it be a fire hazard, but you don't want to be near anything that could conduct that much electricity. We had a fatality in our area a few weeks ago related to a similar incident, where a man threw christmas lights over high voltage and was electrocuted, and don't want to see it happen again.

  • Do you have any pictures of the aftermath?

  • wow its electrifying!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol