Why yes, that is a natural gas line running to the furnace and water heater: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricians/comments/1fpo26t/not_something_you_see_everyday_evidently_this/
Not something you see everyday. Evidently this image has gone a bit viral, but this is a friend of mines house. She hit me up wondering if I knew what might cause it. The flex was pulling about 175 amps and was at 1200 degrees. There’s to be a whole news story on it and everything.
Mother of god, dare I say this post… blew up. There are a lot of questions and there is no way I can get to everyone. Basically, during a storm a tree fell on the incoming lines and it caused some fucked up high voltage things and created a new ground.
step 1. turn off the main breaker to the house
according to that reddit post, during a storm power line fell on gas meter, energizing gas line. now, that means that current flows bypassing meter and breakers entirely, going to ground via gas line, glowing flex, then water pipes and/or neutral. normal breakers won’t trip, because neutral does not have breakers. GFCI should trip, but it does nothing to stop gas pipe from glowing because current that heats it doesn’t flow through there. to unfuck this particular situation you’d need to trip breaker at substation, or disconnect power line going to that area
gas line could be shut off in principle, but it’ll be energized, so it’s not an option
yikes. worse than I thought
yeah that’s on the more catastrophic end of scale, nothing can be done at that residential address
why is the US grid so feeble that leakages of this size (and surely a whole neighborhood’s gas network getting heated to these temperatures is detectable, right?) aren’t automatically disabled by the power company’s computers or some other controllers in the network?
They would have to have a lot of switches and network wires connecting them and systems to monitor them. Even then, I doubt this draw would be enough to signal to them that it’s a problem. Probably not drawing more than a stove on the cleaning cycle, far below a level that would say, “This area is drawing too much power”.
The post say s it was 175A which is substantial but still not enough to notice at a neighborhood level of they were monitoring there.
I see, so less many US house’s capacities in total current leakage? This post makes me so grateful I don’t have a gas connection in my building
edit: was that total current leaked in the whole neighborhood or just the one house?
From the post it implies that 175A was going into the house (but bypassing the meter so it couldn’t be caught there)
So yeah it would be like ~+1 maxed out house running like 10 space heaters
you don’t need a lot of computers there, it all can even work without communication with power company. on medium voltage (15kV) lines, that would be reclosers every few kilometers, and these do trip when short to ground (>0.5A) is detected. but no one does that on low voltage, because potential for damage is much less. the difference between euro and american grids is that americans have medium voltage line going down every single street, and because of low voltages and high power draw conductors would have to be of monstrous size otherwise. i understand that GFCIs are rather uncommon out there, and these aren’t usually installed in substations either. there are also lots of smaller transformers in american grid and that would make costs of putting all that protection circuitry even higher (in my home village there was 1 15/0.4kV substation per some 250 people, or 80ish houses. americans can have one transformer per one house) gas line could be plastic, so it would be isolating and so it’d be limited to that one house
If I didn’t want the house to burn down for the insurance, I’d probably go shoot the power line down. Finally a use for BMG.
that sounds pretty dangerous and i’m not sure if it would even work, because for it to work it requires line to get shorted somewhere else with better ground resistance, tripping breaker at substation. if it fails, you have now high step voltage on the ground and not just near water pipes underground. or it requires line to be cut, and to be sure you’d need to hit all 4 (euro) or 3 (american) wires or insulators. or you could try to pull out fuses at substation, (with insulated tools, on low voltage side) at least for these that i’ve seen it’s possible (like this one https://www.sonepar.fr/catalog/fr-FR/products/05584019458). if fuses are bolted on tho, shit outta luck. (no idea what americans are using)
e: the more i read about american electrical code, the more horrified i get. you can get mains voltages of 120v phase-neutral, 208v phase-neutral, 208v interphase, 230v interphase, 240v interphase, 240v phase-neutral, 277v phase-neutral, perhaps 416v phase-neutral, 480v interphase, or perhaps 480v phase-neutral. of which 277v and 480v are for business customers only? (and 347v, 600v in canada)
this can only be a result of plug manufacturers conspiracy
if you want to supply both three-phase and single-phase, supply three-phase as symmetric three-phase + neutral and supply single-phase as phase-to-neutral. it’s simple, it’s sane, it’s standardized, and it’s efficient in copper. that way nobody needs 200A circuits, 7kV transmission line running down every damn street and substation every 5 houses because all high power loads are three-phase, that also means no large imbalances in load happen
it looks like end result of decades of penny pinching managerialism with zero planning for any standardization
Hamas has opened a new front.
Jeez, sounds like a Roland Emmerich movie.
“Get me the president!”
Wrong, step 1 is take a photo obviously!