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21/12/2012 Doomday report

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: 21/12/2012 Doomday report

#13
True story -- Last night, the house lost power after a long struggle with brownouts. At exactly 9:00pm the house lost the battle and the power went dark.

Looking out the front window to see if the entire neighborhood had lost power or if it was just us, I was shocked to see a full-view lightshow going on in the skies. The lights changed from green to red to blue to pink in lightning flash changes.

My daughter ran to the door and asked me what was going on, and I joked that maybe the Mayans were right. Over the next 45 seconds, as the sky continued its ostentation, I became less and less sure that it wasn't the case. I stood agape watching the sky change, oblivious to the fact that my daughter had begun crying until after what seemed like an eternity, the lights stopped and all we could see in the distance was a faint red flickering glow.

What had happened of course was that a transformer had exploded and gone haywire. The light show was because of that, as was the power outage.

Afterward, I began consoling my daughter and relayed that I thought it had just been a transformer, and that we'd probably have power restored within a few hours, but honestly, for about 30 seconds, I wasn't entirely sure that the world's future was as sound as I had previously known it to be.

Re: 21/12/2012 Doomday report

#14
post #13

True story -- Last night, the house lost power after a long struggle with brownouts. At exactly 9:00pm the house lost the battle and the power went dark. Looking out the front window to see if the entire neighborhood had lost power or if it was just us, I was shocked to see a full-view lightshow going on in the skies. The lights changed from green to red to blue to pink in lightning flash changes. My daughter ran to…

Seen that before. those transformers will light up like christmas trees when they start to short-curcuit. Was a weird thing though considering.

Re: 21/12/2012 Doomday report

#16
post #14
post #13

True story -- Last night, the house lost power after a long struggle with brownouts. At exactly 9:00pm the house lost the battle and the power went dark. Looking out the front window to see if the entire neighborhood had lost power or if it was just us, I was shocked to see a full-view lightshow going on in the skies. The lights changed from green to red to blue to pink in lightning flash changes. My daughter ran to…

Seen that before. those transformers will light up like christmas trees when they start to short-curcuit. Was a weird thing though considering.

I just saw on the news that it wasn't one transformer that exploded (or at least, not a normal sized transformer), but a transformer substation, which I believe means multiple transformer units, maybe.

I'm guessing that, and our relative nearness to it explains why it seemed to fill the entire sky.

Either way, yeah, it was trippy. I've never seen the like.

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