A power substation in Redmond, WA, about 2 miles from my house, experienced an explosion and fire today.
I’ve been watching the King5 live feed.
Thick black smoke is bellowing from the site—probably a mixture of burning insulation and transformer oil. In the bad old days, transformer oil contained PCBs. Nasty stuff. But I don’t think this substation is old enough to have the rally nasty stuff on-site.
It is probably unwise to use water to fight fires at electrical substations, so they brought in a foam truck, supposedly from Seatac.
They’ve dumped a third load of foam on the fire, and it is still going strong.
Oh…the humanity!
Update: A fourth application of foam applied from multiple angles seems to be doing the trick.
Update: MyNorthwest, “Puget Sound Energy tells KIRO Radio there are about 9,000 scattered outages in the area.”
Okay, so that was why we lost power for a few seconds a couple of hours ago. I had to re-boot my computer and re-open all my programs again.
rhp6033,
Yep…even KUOW lost its signal for 1/2 second.
I’ve seen some twitter traffic suggesting there are some rolling blackouts in the region.
King 5 is reporting traffic signals out, part of Microsoft in Redmond is without power, as are some schools. The evening commute might be a nightmare.
Watching the live stream from King 5, I’m thinking that the chopper seems awfully close to those high-voltage power lines. Sure, the power is probably off now, but those lines can bring down a chopper all by themselves. And if there is more than one station’s chopper circling that fire, the pilot really has his hands full.
If some hotshot reporter decides he wants to make his career by insisting that the pilot get closer for a better shot, I wouldn’t blame the pilot at all giving the reporter a shove out the door, and hollering after him as he falls: “There – are you close enough now?”
rhp6033,
The helicopter is well away from the power lines. They are zoomed in on the scene, and occasionally zoom out for a larger perspective.
By law, the helicopter has to be 500 feet above any all structures (expect during take-off and landing operations) in low-population areas, and 1,000 feet in densely populated areas. The 500 foot rule probably works for this part of Redmond.
# 4: Okay, but that’s quite a zoom they’ve got on that camera.
@5 May be a leftover from the intense competition between Seattle’s TV stations back in the day when they were all providing competing coverage of the hydroplane races. Their engineering folks (I suspect with help from friends in the physics and astronomy departments at the UW) custom-built some truly remarkable long-focal-length lenses.
Then in (more or less) related news, Nebraska has it’s own problems…
The video is here
Why isn’t a level 4 nuclear accident headline news?
At what point do we hold utilities liable for outages caused by their negligence?
# 6: That’s a pretty good hypothesis.
I’ve used telephoto lenses a lot in taking picture of crew races. The problem with really long telephoto lenses is they are hard to hold steady (with so much weight up front), and the movement is magnified so that they frequently appear very shakey. You also lose depth perspective. I’m thinking that they must have compensators of some sort – digital image stabilization, etc.
At one point in the mid-1970’s, someone was producing a mount to hold the camera and the long lense, designed for professional photographers. The problem was, it looked an awful lot like a rifle stock with a rifle and bit telescopic sight on top, and the Secret Service started to have a cow when photographers showed up with them to cover the President. This wasn’t that long after Squeeky Fromme (sp?) tried to assasinate Gerald Ford, so I guess they had reason to be concerned.
Ekim,
“The NRC has declared it a level 4 accident.”
That is just plain bad reporting. It is a Notification of Unusual Event under the U.S. system of reporting events (see this). A NOUE is a sub-emergency classification, followed by an Alert, a Site Area Emergency, and a General Emergency.
The NOUE is NOT a “Stage 4 Emergency” as defined by the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Not even close!
It’s kind of funny seeing the Google AdSense ads which load up on the left-hand side of the home screen for this site. As soon as this topic was listed, you had a couple of water-repair companies listed, someone advertising for “transformer monitoring”, etc.
The cameras on those helicopters are really amazing. You can get quite close up views from a mile or two off. Last I heard just the lens for those babies ran about 60K. My bigger pair of binoculars are 12 power, those lens’s can go to 50 or 60. Also, using a really high power zoom compresses depth perception, so two things that look close together might not be.
Here’s (I think) what you’d need to make your DSLR work like the video cameras in a news copter.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/.....EX_DG.html
Look, if you don’t like the service of PSE or you get all faint in the knees when a PSE plant catches fire and dumps cancerous fumes and ash into your environment, you need to use the free market and choose another provider.
While I don’t believe that because I am a well known liberal, as I understand my
GrandConfederate Old Party friends you should be able to (if you don’t mind socialist companies) just use Seattle City Light.And, by the way, you think the reason you cannot do this in Washington State, which has been ruled by evil socialists for over 30 years, then you should just move to anyone of the other states which offer free market freedom.
(Conservatives, help me out here. Which of those free states in the South has free market electric power?)
MBS@14,
Texas
@15 Deregulation results in higher power costs for consumers — who wudda thunk?!
(Shades of Enron … )
What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Breath deeply now!