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A comment on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock. Parent comment

Re:Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-wee... by freeone3000 on Saturday March 14, 2026 @08:40AM (#47376072)
Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.
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Re:Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-wee... by ssl-3 on Monday March 16, 2026 @05:31AM (#47396801)
They can. They do.

But when the wind is whipping along on a warm day and there are bright flashes and audible bangs, that's (usually!) not signs of transformers blowing up... even though the popular vernacular often erroneously describes it that way.

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