Apparently, this is all caused by the downed power line you see at the beginning of the video. Not what we wanna see, ever.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=87b_1177809849

now that cooking there i can see why the fire dept have to wait until the poco kill the power to get that fire out that pretty instene there

Merci, Marc

Is there any reason the OCPD did not open, even if it is on the POCO side? That seemed to be a pretty big fault

That video is from 2004.

I was able to just barely read the sign at about 4:09 ....Aldo's

That was a nightclub in Lyndhurst, NJ

Here is the accompaning story:
Fire destroys Lyndhurst nightspot
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php...ZUVFeXkzJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2NTY2OTkw

Thanks for the added info Celtic.

And yes Cooper, that's my question exactly. This went from a nasty arc to a devestaing fire. Isn't the job of an overcurrent device specifically to avoid fires and protect the installation? This is obviously a massive failure all the way around.

Any linemen in here know why this happened, and what was supposed to happen when the line fell?

From the article it sounds like the fire is what caused the electrical arcing. I’m guessing that the fire melted the insulation on the service conductors feeding the building.

Service conductors essentially have no overcurrent protection. On my street we have 3 transformers feeding a 120/240 "bus" that serves about 10 houses. If overall demand is low you could see virtually all of that power in one SE fault. I doubt you could ever blow a primary fuse.

As spectacular as that arc fire looked, the fact that it was continuing to arc instead of blowing up was indicative of it being a high resistance ground fault. That would explain why the SCPD did not clear it; it wasn't pulling sufficient current to blow the fuses or trip the breaker. That video makes a great argument for arcing ground fault detection devices.