Fireball Travelling Down Power Lines in Montreal

What video? I don't see any link to a video.

I haven't seen it.

Moment huge fireball traveled down power lines near Quebec just ...

Or: http://youtu.be/34r6RGF2JLA

Goodness gracious great balls of fire..!! That was awesome.....lousy camera work though....DC meets AC....that had to be millions of volts....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34r6RGF2JLA&feature=youtu.be

I watched it a number of times.

I am suspecting that something started a line to line arc and the wind was just the right speed and direction to push it along horizontally similar to how a Jacobs ladder travels vertically.

As far as voltage goes I suspect it was normal line voltages but it was on a higher current feeder that could carry a sustained arc without having the main breakers trip right away.

The formation of plasma by the arc uses up air in the arc and it becomes slightly higher in resistance(my guess). This forces the arc along the lines. It is not particularly high voltage going by the insulators in the picture, but the available high current because protection has not tripped allows it to propagate. With the Jacobs Ladder the arc eventually goes out as the distance between the rails increases and heat drives the arc up into a curve.

The power lines were the same distance apart so this arc stretching was not occurring.

Well they speculate in the article that this might, could be, ball lightning....I personally have never seen this phenomena, but my grandmother said she saw it once, it was about the size of a basketball, came through a closed sliding glass door, through the house and out a wall across the street and into a neighbors house who claimed she saw it as well....weird....I got to checking, frankly I thought she might be losing it....and it has been reported.....although it certainly is quite rare...

Found this on Wiki...

"

Black hole hypothesis

Another hypothesis is that some ball lightning is the passage of microscopic primordial black holes through the Earth's atmosphere. This possibility was mentioned parenthetically by Leo Vuyk in 1992 in a patent application and a second patent application in 1996 by Leendert Vuyk. The first detailed scientific analysis was published by Mario Rabinowitz in Astrophysics and Space Science journal in 1999.^[69] Inspired by M. Fitzgerald's account of ball lightning on 6 August 1868, in Ireland that lasted 20 minutes and left a 6-metre square hole, a 90-metre long trench, a second trench 25 meters long, and a small cave in the peat bog. Pace VanDevender, a plasma physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his team found depressions consistent with Fitzgerald's report and inferred that the evidence is inconsistent with thermal (chemical or nuclear) and electrostatic effects. An electromagnetically levitated, compact mass of over 20,000 kg would produce the reported effects but requires a density of more than 2000 times the density of gold, which implies a miniature black hole. He and his team found a second event in the peat-bog witness plate from 1982 and are trying to geolocate electromagnetic emission consistent with the hypothesis. His colleagues at the institute agreed that, implausible though the hypothesis seemed, it was worthy of their attention.^[70]"

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning}

For a fictional treatment, check out Bill deSmedt's Singularity. The Tunguska event is speculated to have been a small black hole, and some plotters try to capture and use the idea.

Had to give you GA for that. Do you have any theories as to what sustains ball lightning? By all accounts they can exist for minutes and (I think) pass through windows/doors - can that be true?

Not really. The fact I could get it to occur regularly enough to be able to get a rough guess at what I was seeing was good enough for me.

No clue as to how the natural ball lightning forms but the duration of what I made seemed to be relative to size. The bigger the ball the longer they would last.

A buddy of mine has a good sized scrap yard where I do the repair work on their big magnet crane systems. He and the guys who work there have said that over the years they have seen a similar phenomenon occasionally occur when the power leads get ripped off their electromagnets with a large iron load on them.

As they describe it odd glowing fuzz balls of electricity will shoot off the leads when they get ripped apart and sometimes bounce around the electromagnets for a second or two before disappearing.

My guess is that some of its creation has to do with inductive field energy being dissipated in an open electric arc.

There are different kinds......very different...I think these are different types of phenomena that just appear to have some similarities in appearance...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNMQMBPrgUA&list=PLA5B4897404F34F8B

That's been my suspicions as well. Similar appearance but likely rather different conditions that create it and maintain the effect.

Actually it was probably not a higher current feeder, but rather it was toward the outer end of a longer feeder with low load. The high impedance of a long cable run and a high-impedance arc, along with low load current, means the standard overcurrent relays at the substation never see high enough current to trip. It's a common problem for a utility's protection engineers with long rural feeders, trying to determine reasonable relay settings when actual fault currents are often so low that they look like normal load current.

Almost like a scene from a Twilight Zone episode

Cool the conspiracy theory jets...just a standard arc-over moving down the line. No St. Elmo here...

Very cool! Got my plasma fix for the day.

Here's some good ones....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2LpCdhuOyQ

Sweet! Thanks.

I liked that at 1:41...interesting.

I blame Jerry Lee Lewis for all this.

The question that came to my mind was ...how did he know it was going to happen so he could have the camera/phone ready??

The blurb under the video says that this was the second fireball. He saw the first, ran to get his camera, was too late to film it, and the, 'Oh poopie! here comes another one!'