eli5 Why is it you see a bunch of videos of balloons catching on fire when they touch power lines but a bird can just sit on them?
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Here is my long 5 year old answer bc the simple answer gets removed by automods. Birds are small and can only sit on one line at a time. Balloons with a string can touch 2 lines at once, thus completing a circuit which isn’t suppose to exist. Boom.
Touching two wires (like a balloon) lets electricity flow from one to the other through you, and will set you on fire. Touching one wire and nothing else (no pole, ground, or other wires) doesn’t give the electricity a path to travel through and won’t hurt you. Every now and then a bird will touch two wires with its wings and basically explode.
” touch power lines” is the key. when you touch multiple power lines with something conductive you get a large current and stuff get hot and can burn.
Birds in on a power line. The only touch one line and then you do not have a complete circuit. If a bird touch two lines, you get the same effect.
This is most often seen in mylar balloons, like you get in the grocery store and can stay nice and floaty for a while.
Unfortunately, mylar balloons are often metallized, coated or infused with metals like aluminium, copper, or gold… Which all conduct electricity really really well.
So when you release your balloon, it hits the power line, and the electricity arcs into the balloon, causing it to heat up, burst, and coat the power line in conductive material. Which is bad. Many power outages occur because of mylar balloons.
But birds are much less conductive than copper and gold, so when they touch the power line, it doesn’t arc into them nearly as badly, and when it does, they don’t explode into a highly conductive mess. The only real time that the birds get killed is when the power line is grounded, which gives the electricity a path through the bird.
But birds to sometimes get shocked and even die from power lines, it just isn’t as common, and when it happens it rarely affects people. So we don’t notice it.
A mylar balloon leads to a power outage, a pigeon leads to a small carcass on the side of the road.
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