PG&E officials said Mylar balloons triggered a power outage in San Francisco's Duboce Triangle neighborhood Tuesday night. The balloons hit overhead electric wires near Duboce Avenue and Market Street around 7:43 p.m., causing a surge in an underground power vault that shattered a manhole cover and plunged 2,900 houses and apartments into darkness.
let slip the baloons of doom
Power Restored After Castro Outage
Tags: blimps, mad science, sf
Current Music: Headscan -- Dead Silver Sky ♬
8 Responses:
Kids, don't attempt Nena and Kraftwerk mashups on your own.
Here I am, scrolling through old JWZ posts, and I click on the comments to this link expressly so I could make a Nena joke... and you've already done it. A month ago.
I am so uncool.
huh huh.... "manhole."
If only there was a law requiring attaching LED lights to mylar balloons so that we could recognize them for what they are: tools of the terrorists.
This should be a HOWTO.
I could swear I read something about the US military dropping mylar strips to short-out the grid in Iraq(?) at the beginning of the war, but my google-fu is failing me.
It is illegal to sell mylar balloons without a weight tied to them.
They are also rather inert, and deflated ones make for great packing material.
I refuse to buy first aid kids without a mylar blanket in them, even though I've never used a mylar blanket for first aid rather than entertainment purposes. Which are endless! Unless it was just a box of band-aids, you know.