Eli5 : Why do lights go out during an earthquake

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In most of my personal experiences and videos seen online, lights seem to go out during strong earthquakes.

Why? I can grab the cord of a lamp and move it around without the lamp turning off, and I don’t think it has something to do with the power company. During earthquakes, some of my friends who live in the same zone or city as me do not experience lights going out.

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Speaking from experience here. During the Northridge earthquake, and for several minutes following, we saw at least half a dozen green flashes from transformers exploding (not the Optimus Prime kind). I couldn’t tell you if they exploded because of shaking or hitting against something or overloading, but between them, the lights would sort of start to come back on and then go out again with the next explosion. I assume this was the power grid trying to redistribute power around the bad transformers. It will be interesting to see what happens when more power cables are buried and not up on poles.

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