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Re: balloons
Tesla List wrote:
>
> >From ed-at-alumni.caltech.eduSun Sep 1 21:58:05 1996
> Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 11:50:49 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "Edward V. Phillips" <ed-at-alumni.caltech.edu>
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: Re: balloons
>
> Re: "fulgurites"
> My neighbor's driveway shows a whole bunch of similar artifacts,
> deeply melted into the concrete, which resulted from a fallen 2200 volt
> transmission line lying on the ground and arcing for a few minutes..
> Happened some time before we moved here 26 years ago, but after
> the neighbor lived there. Until I pointed them out to him he never knew
> what they were, and just reported that "they appeared one morning after
> a wind storm took our power out for a while". The traces are "frozen
> lightning", some a half inch wide and many inches long, completely
> vitrified.
> Ed Phillips
I had a similar encounter:
After a particularly nasty thunderstorm moved out of the area, driving
home I noticed several fire engines in a parking lot. Apparently a
lightning bolt struck a 14Kv grid line and dropped it to the asphalt
parking lot below. The lightning strike followed the wire down, and
literally blasted a small crater into the asphalt surface. Meanwhile,
the 14Kv line was still 'hot', and the periodic flaming 'jacob's ladder'
arcs were most impressive - rising some 6 to 7 feet into the air at
times with that nasty 60 cycle hum.
Anyways, after the power company killed the grid to that region, and the
fire people were satisfied that nothing was still combusting, I took
my tire-iron from the car and went to work on the still-steaming
crater. I managed to extricate a sizeable chunk of vitrified asphalt/dirt
that was still glowing in the center!!!! Also managed to extract several
of the tentrils - neat looking stuff. Crusty on the outside but hollow
on the inside with a nice, smooth glassy lining!
Someday I hope to run across a fulgarite in the desert as I here that
the sand out there will occasionally form a greenish glass.
- Brent