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Do lights flicker when bombs drop?

There is a cinematic trope that if you are in a bunker or cellar, the lights flicker when there is a crump of a bomb outside. (I can give examples if necessary.) This happens in the Blitz and in 1944 Berlin and many other places.

I can see why a bomb might take out a substation or bring down wires and then you are in the dark, but is there anything behind the flickering apart from lazy direction?

Oh, and why do they buzz as they flicker?

EGKB Biggin Hill

Cinematic licence.Many years ago I was in the Europa hotel in Belfast when a bomb went off in reception. My room was on the 4th floor if I remembet correctly. There wad a loud but dull thud followed by the lights going out. Then silence for what seemed like 30 seconds before alarms, sirens, people yelling built into a cacophany. For that thirty seconds the world seemed to stop.
On a different tack, why does the daylight suddenly become darker in an earthquake, for real, not in movies.

France

gallois wrote:

On a different tack, why does the daylight suddenly become darker in an earthquake, for real, not in movies.

Dust in the air?

Timothy wrote:

but is there anything behind the flickering apart from lazy direction?

Yes in nuclear ones you get load of electromagnetic waves (EMP)
I think the explanation for lights ON/OFF is vibrations as does hitting the wall with your hand near mechanical light switches?

gallois wrote:

On a different tack, why does the daylight suddenly become darker in an earthquake

Maybe biological (stress/gforces) as does daylight becoming darker in non-expected spin entries whatever the recovery outcome

Last Edited by Ibra at 01 Jul 22:15
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Voltage disturbances can cause light flickering, happens not uncommonly to us living in a village during storms or if there are grid faults. However as others say more commonly it’s a total loss if something major has gone on.

Having recently experienced BT coming out to sort a broadband issue, and watched the engineers walking up and down the village roads to get a mobile signal for their line testing phone app (BT have apparently never considered the case we don’t have full mobile signal) I’m pretty convinced any major power or data loss would totally screw modern life.

Now retired from forums best wishes

gallois wrote:

why does the daylight suddenly become darker in an earthquake, for real, not in movies

It doesn’t. You also can’t hear them that well unless stuff actually collapeses. Admittedly, I have only direct experience of a few dozen, and not all of them were above magnitude 7.

Last Edited by Cobalt at 01 Jul 23:20
Biggin Hill

I don’t know about the WW2 era power distribution but it is probably similar to today’s. If something shorts out some HV power line, a circuit breaker trips out and then tries to reconnect. If it fails then they isolate that line and route it via another route. AFAIK this is automatic and happens in a second or two, and this is one reason why we get brief power cuts. But you don’t get lights flickering. It is on or off. And if there is no other route then they stay off until they get somebody out there to repair it

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

My experience of power cuts (in rural areas) is that they either last 2 seconds, 2 minutes or 2 hours. The 2 hour ones are presumably where on-site human activity is required to restore power.

EGLM & EGTN

Ahh @Cobalt, admittedly I have only experienced three and none of them were of proportions to bring a city down but on each occasion the camera lens iris needed to be opened by between 2 and 3 stops just before the trembling and noise began and continued during, brightening up again after the trembling finished.

France

I was fortunately far enough away (Tokyo) when the 2011 earthquake hit, but where I was was certainly strong enough that anyone walking made a good impression of being drunk, so most people knelt down. Nice day, no sign of darkening at all. Over the next few days there were literally dozens of smaller earthquakes, with no perceptible difference to the light conditions.

I think a lot of earthquake related observations (and there is the opposite – reporting of “Earthquake Lights”) are rooted in the powerful capability of the human brain to see correlations when there are none, and then assume they are causal.

I am certainly not immune – and what follows is not a joke, but true. When the earthquake hit, I had put a coin into a vending machine and pressed the button. The first shock hit, I was startled, and the next couple of minutes were …. not much fun.

For months afterwards, I had a very funny feeling in my stomach when using any vending machine. I was perfectly aware that me pressing that button did not in any way cause the earthquake, but some part of my brain begged to differ, and told me so.

Biggin Hill
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