Power outage

[KC Loewen]

Anyone know what caused the power outage from about 7-8:30 pm in the Gavello Glen area? Due to all the cars on Iris Ave I'm guessing a car hit a pole of Wolfe Rd. southbound.

[Jimming]

We just got power back 15 minutes ago at the NW corner of Wolfe and El Camino

[Dan]

The power outage was caused by a 4000-volt power line falling to the ground at ~7:15pm due to rain and crappy old wooden electricity poles near the old kindergarten at Gary and Wolfe.

The power line created a MASSIVE arc welding fire with enormous sparks and electrical whizzing that got all nearby residents out of their homes. Within a few minutes, there were 5 fire trucks at the scene, 2 police vans, 1 emergency van, 1 PG&E utility vehicle, and traffic on Gary Ave. was diverted.

Within an hour, electricity was cut off, along with DSL. The power outage lasted until ~9pm, while DSL Internet access was back around 11pm. I have video footage of the event.

[Jim Griffith]

Dan, is the video up on SunnyvaleRocks.com yet? I think the major media missed out on that one, so you've sort of got an exclusive on that one.

[Wally]

Don't keep us in suspense. Hook us up with the video footage :)

It was really odd how the power in the area went off and on for a few moments before finally going down for that hour and a half.

Interrupted my online game play experiance.
Had to resort to reading a book by candle light.

[KC Loewen]

Love to see that video as well. Got youtube?

[Ale]

For us, power only came back around 3 AM. It woke the whole family up as suddenly all lights went on in the middle of the night :0

This old candle time was nice...we had to talk rather than watching TV :-)

[Dan]

I downloaded all the video clips from the camera but they're over 1 gigabyte in size. I'll try to make a decent edit and post it online today. Haven't used Windows Movie Maker yet, so wish me luck. The footage is cool though - I report live while talking on the phone to a friend, and there are firemen voices in the background to tell me to evacuate. All of that overlaid on top of the electric whizz and daylight-like illumination caused by the electric arc.

[Groucho]

Dan wrote:

I downloaded all the video clips from the camera but they're over 1 gigabyte in size. I'll try to make a decent edit and post it online today. Haven't used Windows Movie Maker yet, so wish me luck. The footage is cool though - I report live while talking on the phone to a friend, and there are firemen voices in the background to tell me to evacuate. All of that overlaid on top of the electric whizz and daylight-like illumination caused by the electric arc.

If you have any photos, put one on flickr and post the link in this thread. Then I can promote the entire forum thread as a main sunnyvale news story, front page.

[SunnyvaleRocks]

Hey there Topix readers. I saw a little spike in traffic on my site (which is still in development) and wanted to thank people for stopping by and apologize for not catching that bit of news.

Some might have seen the power failure that occurred back on Halloween, caused by a power pole breaking up near the top, which lead the PG&E crews to have to come in and replace that pole. Took many hours.

There are some stills and video of that event, but not of the one referred to in this thread. Maybe next time. Thanks for stopping by, though, and please do return once the site is up and running... not to plug too hard, but it's an attempt at a community news paper by people who are in Sunnyvale...

cheers and happy holidays to all!

[Dan]

The video footage is currently being uploaded to http://www.youtube.com/user/russellparadox

It should be there by 6am PST.

Do I still need to upload pictures to get this thread promoted as a main Sunnyvale news story?:)

[KC Loewen]

Great footage Dan, thank you!

[Groucho]

That is some great footage. I took a screenshot of your video and pushed it up.

Incidentally, if you're interested in becoming and editor for this Topix Sunnyvale news page, just register here:

http://www.topix.com/member/editor-applicatio...

It's free, easy and pretty fun, too.

[Groucho]

Looks like someone also posted a pic on the Merc:

http://yourviews.mercurynews.com/mycapture/ph...

[Groucho]

Oh yeah - and you can upload your photos directly to the Sunnyvale page here: http://www.topix.com/album/upload/sunnyvale-c...

[Hank]

Still photos posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hwatts/sets/7215...