Massive fires in Queens:
And -- is that thing really a shark?
This substation explosion really would have gotten my attention. I can't believe people are walking around in that water. There's way too many buried electrical lines in New York for that kind of thing.
7 comments:
It may look like the apocalypse. It isn't. I have friends, aquaintances and in-laws around an in NYC, and all of them are fine and have power.
It's a big place.
I should think anyone a reasonable distance from the shore is just fine. It's pretty nasty down near the water, though. They'll be a long time getting those tunnels and subways back in running order, and restoring power to the 7 million people who've lost it. So, apocalypse? Of course not, but nothing minor, either.
That power substation that exploded in the RT video serves the office some of my customers work in. Minimum four more days till they get power.
When I got the privilege of experiencing the Ice Storm of '07, what I remember the most (aside from the tree that tried to break into my apartment) were all the exploding transformers. The first one to go was kitty-corner from my apartment building, and for the next four hours there was a near-constant flash "bang", flash "bang," as 3/4 of the town lost power. Not quite as dramatic as the one in NYC, but still attention getting.
LittleRed1
I've never been near one that big that went off, but I remember being near a smaller one that blew up. It was occasioned, oddly enough, by a squirrel who stepped from one high tension wire to another, momentarily creating a bridge between the two. Most of the squirrel was accelerated into vapor, and the nearby transformer exploded impressively as well.
Our electrical lines are buried here, but in the Houston suburbs squirrel-transformer explosions were so common as to excite no comment. Man, they were loud. Always seemed to me that must be an expensive problem for the utility company, but I guess not so much that they figured out a way to prevent them.
You'd think they'd space the wires slightly farther apart than a squirrel could bridge...
My Dad is from New Jersey, and I asked him what the worst storm surge he ever saw was. He told me about the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944. The house he would later move to near the beach (on a Northerly face across from Staten Island) had apparently seen water reach the threshold, which was a good five feet up, and he recounted coming out to see lots of downed trees (big ones) and plenty of damage, including the boardwalk in their town being destroyed. Wikipedia bears out his anecdotes as it sounding much like what Sandy has done. If you hear anyone blaming global warming, you can ask them if that also caused that hurricane.
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