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
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, 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.
yikes. worse than I thought
yeah that’s on the more catastrophic end of scale, nothing can be done at that residential address
Wrong, step 1 is take a photo obviously!