The Green Subatomic Glow

Last night as I got home I proved myself to be a somewhat observant person. Driving up the alleyway I immediately noticed a light that was not there before atop one of the electric polls. After seconds more glancing at it as I drove slowly up the icy alley I decided it was probably some sort of electrical arc due to its flickering nature and thus was something bad. The noise when I got out of the car confirmed it without any doubt and worse the lights of my building were pulsing very slightly.

So inside to make a call to Excel Energy Co. I reported everything without exaggeration, afterward I was wondering if I understated the case at all because though I arrived home about eight in the evening there was no sign of activity. The situation continued to get worse with visible Jacob's Ladder type arcing starting and I shut down all electrical equipment inside except a few lights. I made a hot toddy for my boyfriend and myself and we settled in to read and occasionally watch the eerie beauty of electricity flowing off into the air in a loop the drifted away from where the wires connected to one another in the very slight breeze.

At around eleven, thirty minutes after we went to bed, a fire truck arrived. There did not seem to be any actual fire, in fact it seemed to have settled down to just a bright green star at the top of the connection wire. Confident that I would not have to evacuate in the dead of night I went back to bed and in the morning found that our precautions based on the notion that the power would go out during the fix were quite wise. It appeared that at some point the power was off for about 15 minutes.

All in all it was a pretty minor problem with the barely tamed quarks trying to escape their normal channels during the cold.