Saturday, July 5, 2008

Mylar balloon strikes close to home

Well With all the talk about Mylar balloons and people trying to get laws passed, this last 4th of July I heard a great big crackle .. snap.. and pop.. and the power to my apartment died. (No Rice Crispies didn't land in my neighborhood to start invading), I ran out side and found that the power was out at my neighbors also. After further investigation I found that the whole neighborhood was out, I called my power company, and they said they were currently aware of the situation and are working on it. So I decided to do some driving around my neighborhood. I found that the outage was quite wide. The next time I talked to the electric company they let me know that a hundred thousand homes had lost power with this outage, however power is being restored, systematically. When I last checked in at 3:00 am the amount of people that were with out power only a few hours after the event was down to 12 thousand. Pretty good work I would say, and the cause? Yes, you guessed it a Mylar balloon from the 4th of July festivities.

Should they be banned? You make the call. Personally I think that they could just be designed to not conduct electricity. What do you think?