BOOM!
Saturday, April 10th, 2004At about 5:15 this morning Erin woke me up from a dead sleep only an hour old. “Wake up! There’s a buzzing sound in the house and the power just went out.” Fearing a massive, CPU-busting electrical surge (not unreasonably, it turned out), I quickly jumped out of bed and started racing around the house unplugging and shutting down the electronics. Every few minutes I would hear a distant BZZZZZZT-BAM followed by a sizzling sound and accompanied by a bright light from outside somewhere.
In the middle of all this, Erin looked out the bedroom window and shouted “WHOA! LOOK OUTSIDE!”.
“What?!?” I yelled, still frantically unplugging and sniffing the air for the smell of burned silicon.
“WOW!” yelled Erin.
“WHAT?” I said
“LOOK OUTSIDE!”
“WHAAAAAT?!?!?!?”
When I finally got to the window, stumbling around in the electricity-less bedroom (you’d be surprised how much a few smoke-detector lights illuminate the place), this is what I saw:
It looked like the pictures from the first day of the war in Baghdad. A half mile away was a huge blaze taller than the megaplex theater (just to the left in the pic). The fire department was already on scene with a boom truck blasting away at the blaze from 100′ in the air. Another truck joined the fun a few minutes later. Every few minutes, one of the transformers that was too close to the fire would cook off and we’d see a tremendous white explosion followed by arcing electricity. A few seconds later we’d hear a BOOM - SIZZLE. Very impressive. Each blast would last a few seconds and then fade until the next one a few minutes later. Once one of the transformers went off for a good 20 seconds, arcing and frying everything within a good 50 feet. It was too bright to look at and sounded like the world’s biggest popcorn skillet.
I had been disappointed with the pictures that I was getting from the digital camera from a half-mile away so I got my binoculars and held the camera very carefully up to the eyepiece. After futzing around for awhile to get the image lined up, I hit the shutter button.
Well, on this camera there is about a 2 second delay from when you hit the shutter to when the pic is actually taken (autofocus time, I guess). In that amount of time another transformer exploded and I got this picture:
You can clearly see the two fire engine booms shooting water onto the blaze. The smoke plume went up several hundred feet and downrange for about a half mile.
The vingetting is due to the camera not being lined up perfectly with the binocular eyepiece. Poor quality pics but I hope they get across just how amazing this was.
This whole time the electricity was off so we had to open our windows to get some ventilation so we could clearly hear the fire and explosions. After about 45 minutes the power came back on and we went back to sleep.
Today we drove by the place and discovered that there is a stash of trucking pallets behind a grove of trees. We’ve never noticed them before. A good-sized pile of them (that we could see) had been burned. It was almost anti-climatic. After all the sturm und drang I wanted to see twisted metal and a devastated countryside.
Even so, it was pretty exciting for 5:30am.
