Originally published at: Watch a fireball dramatically travels along powerlines | Boing Boing
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Here’s a deep link to save you all the local news yammering
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I’m sure that the humid salt air in NO must wreak havoc on any wiring, and I expect a less than aggressive maintenance schedule is also involved, but the couple of times I was there it seemed like half the transformers were popping, crackling and “sizzling like a snare”.
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Reminds me of the witch scene in Conan the Barbarian.
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This is a horizontal Jacob’s Ladder.
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Looks like a Jacob’s Ladder going on between two high voltage conductors.
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“Fireball” ← there, fixed it by adding quotation marks.
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I had to research sea salt aerosols for a distillery I was consulting on eastern Long Island. I was absolutely shocked at the amount of salt in the air; everything had to be specially plated to avoid corrosion.
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yep, time to move!
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oh really now 
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Yeah it looks like an arc but Jacob’s ladders only go upwards for a reason, not sideways and not down.
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They go up because the heated air around the plasma rises. They could easily travel horizontally driven by a light breeze.
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Or start at the lowest point of the sag between poles, then crawl up to the highest point at one of the poles, likey downwind.
Remarkable video! I hope someone with physics/engineering expertise can weigh in on the likely explanation. One comment suggests that it could be a Jacob’s Ladder effect, in which the ionized air, rather than rising vertically as in the usual demo, is (by chance) blown in the same direction as the wires. That sounds plausible - it doesn’t have to be exactly the same direction, but the further off, the greater the dilution of the ions. Someone with more physics knowledge than me would have to say how likely that is. And perhaps someone with local knowledge plus weather records can say which way the wind was blowing at the time. I thought of another possible explanation - the intense heat will tend to expand the metal wires, possibly bringing them closer together and thus increasing the potential gradient until the arcing threshold is reached. Whether that can explain the propagation of the effect will depend on the exact geometry, the relative thickness of the two wires, etc etc. One clue is that the speed of propagation appears (I think) to be faster at the midpoint between the suspension points, and slower closer to the poles, suggesting some geometric explanation related to the catenary curves of the two wires. My math is not good enough to figure out whether that explanation could work…
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