I’m here to tell you when I heard Sally’s story, I felt like I knew just what she was talking about! I once spent a whole spooky night inside the Ryan High Voltage Lab on the Stanford campus on a dare (ok, it was dumb, but I was only in junior high school at the time), and believe me, even with no experiments going on, there were plenty of frighteningly loud and flashy discharges! It was unforgettable.
So, here’s my theory. IMHO, it was most likely a corona discharge, aka a flashover, from a nearby very high voltage transmission line.
Wikipedia, Corona discharge - Problems_caused_by_corona_discharges
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge - Problems_caused_by_corona_discharges>
You wanna see some pictures? Check out the Stanford University website pages on the Ryan High Voltage Lab (1926-1988). http://lbre.stanford.edu/sem/ryan_high_voltage_lab.
You can see more pictures and stories in a fun article linked there.
Moffat, Shannon. Stanford’s power line research pioneers. 1988 http://histsoc.stanford.edu/pdfST/ST12no2_3.pdf
Plus, you can see more about the electric industry’s gear for checking corona discharges at the EPRI website. (Electric Power Research Institute, Transmission Lines and Substations)
And by some strange coincidence, there happens to be just the right kind of rare, very high voltage line that runs right through that part of New York State, too. You can see for yourself on the NPR website.
Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid - NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398 (just click on the legend to clear away the lower voltage lines).
And if that wasn’t enough overkill, you could always ask your Harvard physics guru Wolfgang Rueckner about it, because he wrote his PhD thesis on high energy. I’ll bet it’s just his kind of thing.
Say, this wasn’t some kind of stealth puzzler, was it?
PS. I don’t think it was an exploding transformer, because that would most likely have been a very spectacular crash and burn event Sally would never have missed.
Also you didnt ask if there was some sort of burn on the ROOF of her vehicle - she talked about seeing the overhead wires… perhaps they were hanging just a bit too low or her truck has been jacked up a little too high such that there was a discharge from the high voltage wires to the chassis. If the voltage was high enough, the wires wouldn’t even have had to touch her vehicle, but there would still be some evidence of “arcing” on the roof, along with the sound and the flash of light. Just as being in a closed vehicle is the safest place in a lightening storm, so would she not have been harmed in this case…
My grandmother used to unplug the television whenever there was a thunderstorm. She explained that once when she was a little girl and listening to the radio with her mother during a storm, a ball of light came out of the radio after a moment of loud static. Sounds as though static electricity from the power line could have arc’d though the radio. As an aside, my mechanic advised me never to leave a charger plugged into the outlet in the car unless it is attached to a phone.
Was it a high-voltage transmission line, or a lower-voltage distribution line?
Was there any transformer nearby?
Were there any trees near the line?
Was there a color tinge to the flash, or was it white?
I live in southern California where we have Santa-Ana winds off the desert; sometimes they get intense. Once years ago, just as I was getting in my car to go to work, the winds blew two phases of the distribution line that was about a 100 feet away. There was a huge green flash (the lines were copper) and a loud ZZZZT sound. I estimate that for a fraction second a megawatt was flowing. Maybe that’s what Sally experienced.
Have you ever been near a lightning strike? She described exactly what occurs under those circumstances and it all occurs within a couple of seconds or less; flash of light, zzzzzt sound, then loud POW! The zzzzzt sound is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or a voltage spike that was undoubtedly caused by some static interaction between her car and the power lines (energy field) she was passing under and/or there was a electric surge or some other event or malfunction occurring in the power lines that coincided with her passage underneath them. She describes it as a clear day and so thunder storm sounds unlikely although, as another person commented, lighting can strike at some considerable distance from the center of the storm. Many people do not realize the extent (distance and strength) to which a strong energy field exists in the vicinity of high-tension power lines, easily extending to the surface area of the road upon which she was driving.
PCB’s have been banned from transformers since 1980, and since most transformers have a life of 30 years, there aren’t too many of those around. If a transformer had blown near her, she would have noticed it, it sounds like a 12 ga.
I just retired from a transformer manufacturer. Every transformer goes through a series of high voltage tests, including a simulated lightning strike, and every once in while, one blows and believe me, they do not go quietly.
It was a clear day according to the caller so lightning is out. In a single phase branch or a three phase distribution line, the bottom wire is the ground wire. It is grounded at least every 1/4 mile, usually every 200 yards, so there was no arc from an HV line to her car.
I vote for high-voltage fault or transformer blowing on the power lines overhead. If it happened right behind her car, she wouldn’t have seen the actual explosion, but it would have certainly lighted up the interior of her car. Another possibility is that lightning could have hit the power lines many miles away and traveled to that point and shorted to the ground or blown the transformer. Lightning can hit a power line from a cloud twenty-five miles away, so there could have been lightning even though it looked like a clear day to Sally. Lightning will also bypass many ground wires along its path on power lines.
I have seen this first hand. I was in the right place at the right time and looking in the right direction.
Driving along, suddenly a power line in front of me going from pole to a building just disappeared with a bright flash and a loud “ZZZZZZZZT!” Apparently the power line shorted to ground and the runaway electric current just vaporized the wire in mid-air and left nothing behind but a brief puff of smoke.
The area was blacked out right after, it must have tripped a circuit breaker at the substation, there weren’t even any traffic lights working when everything was fine a moment before.
The huge spark she saw would also have emitted wide band radio waves interfering with the car’s radio, she’d hear it from the car’s speakers as well as from outside. This would explain her feeling like it was all around her, especially if she were listening to an AM station. (Incidently some early 1900’s Morse code transmitters used this principle.)
It is not possible for a 12 volt phone charger to “fry” with this kind of outcome.
Car power outlets all have either 2Amp or 10Amp fuses which would limit the current such that a short couldn’t create a discharge of much size.
The same thing happened to me on a country road during daylight hours in a Nissan Pathfinder. The next day the vehicle would not start as the recently installed rebuilt starter was toast. I blamed the bad starter. But who knows. Electrical gremlins can be strange.
Perhaps Sally, driving to Waccabuc, New York, should call the Electric company that owns the power lines she was driving under and ask to speak to their technicians, perhaps those that work on power lines, (rather than those that work on power after it enters buildings,) and ask what could have caused it.
My husband told about how once, one summer in the 1950’s when he was a teen, an intensely bright blue flash occurred in his folks’ house and it ran along the middle of the ceiling of their house, through the living room and all the way down the hall way. This occurred only one time, in all the decades they lived there. His father built the house, and no electrical failures occurred with it. No one was working with the wiring at all at the time. His parents saw it as well.
Have you considered “St Elmo’s Fire”? A strange static discharge that can dance around a bit as it passes to its point of discharge. It has been known to occur on ocean-going ships in times past, and in the pioneer, prairie days, it could occur by hitting metal stove-pipes, travelling down to their pot-bellied stoves, or kitchen cook-stoves, and causing peculiar flashes of crackling light to even “roll around on the floor” a bit before disappearing (or discharging,) scaring the dickens out of observers. This more commonly occurred in warmer dryer seasons, I think, but in New York State, so close to the highest populated city in the US, New York City, the power lines Sally drove under may have been very high capacity lines indeed!
Electricity can be a very strange thing indeed, all by itself, and without any other-worldly, “extraterrestrial” help at all!
My wife and I have seen this effect at least twice. Above the woman’s car, a squirrel was crossing the road using the power line as a private highway. The little critter evidently touched two bare conductors simultaneously and turned itself into a very energetic arc lamp for a few seconds. The incredibly bright light and sound she described map exactly with our experiences, twice now. In one case we had to phone the fire department to put out the fire atop a local power pole which was caused this way. The light is as bright as the sun, and much, much closer. No one realizes how much power is coursing through power lines only 15-20 feet above our heads! Local lines are typically run at around 13.5 KV, sometimes 25KV (Kilo volts) at enormous amperage. The driver would not have realized the light came from outside her car, but it’s so intense it would still be enormously bright even though, say, 50 feet away. The sound she described is also exactly what we’ve heard, sadly more than once. Once seen, this is difficult to mistake for anything else.
I think it was most likely caused by a solar flare. According to http://solarstormwarning.com/, there was a large solar flare on February 15, the time that the incedint occurred around, which primarily affected the north. Solar flares are known to disrupt radio waves and release large amounts of static electricity. This seems to me to be the most logical explanation for the phenomenon.
ND1L, good write up, except that it would take a huge squirrel to touch two power lines at the same time, but when they get to a pole, they can touch the wire and pole at the same time and that would do it. That usually happens on 2400 volt circuits as the insulators for the higher voltage lines are quite a but taller.