Sirens and Bright Light

I was driving home from Bible Study on Monday night with my new British friend, Ant, and as we drove past a telegraph pole in Hornsby, I looked up and saw a bright light. I said to Ant "Look there's someone welding, on top of the pole, all by themselves." I thought it was odd that there would be a person on top of a telegraph pole at 10:30pm doing some welding. But then when I looked further, I saw there was no person up there, just the bright light. I realised that this was electricity, burning brightly where it shouldn't be burning brightly, coming out of the top of a telegraph pole.

This was an exciting discovery for me, this meant it was an emergency. So I said dramatically "We're going to have to call emergency services!" I put on my hazards and did a u-turn to get a better look, used my iPhone GPS to figure out exactly where it was, then dialed triple-0. I reported that there was a telegraph pole on fire, and I think the lady on the other end was happy to have taken such an pivotal call in the safety of the nation and our fight against terrorism and stuff.

Once that was done we parked and wandered a little closer to watch this sparking electrical brilliance. At times is grew very bright, bright like a thousand suns (minus 999.9999 of them) and made a noise some what resembling battle involving multiple lightsabers. We didn't stand too close, as we thought it might explode. That was certainly my hope.

The Fireys and the Cops arrived about 3 minutes after I called. They parked right opposite the sparking thing, so it seemed they weren't too worried about explosions.

I was then hoping to see some action as the fireys set about putting it out but everyone just stood around staring at it. They informed us that you can't really put the fire out, you just have to turn off the electricity.

So it was less exciting than I'd hoped. But still more exciting than a normal drive home.

As it turned out, one of the fire fighters was my friend Wayne who I used to think was awesome when I was a kid, and who I got lost in a canyon with when we all went canyoning with Keith. It was a nice moment.

When we realised nothing more was going to happen, we left. Our work was done, Hornsby was safe in the hands of the NSW Fire Brigade.