The Universe of Discourse

Colored blobs on electric wires

The high-voltage power lines run along the New Jersey Turnpike for a long way, and there is this one short stretch of road where the wires have red, white, and yellow blobs on them. Google's Street View shot shows them quite clearly.

A thousand feet or so farther down the road, no more blobs.

I did Internet searches to find out what the blobs were about, and everyone seemed to agree that they were to make the wires more visible to low-flying aircraft. Which seemed reasonable, but puzzling, because as far as I knew there was no airport in the vicinity. And anyway, why blobs only on that one short stretch of wire?

Last week I drove Katara up to New York and when I saw the blobs coming I asked her to photograph them and email me the pictures. She did, and as I hoped, there in the EXIF data in the images was the exact location at which the pictures had been taken: !!(40.2106, -74.57726675)!!. I handed the coordinates to Google and it gave me the answer to my question:

The wires with blobs are exactly in line with the runway of nearby Trenton-Robbinsville Airport. Mystery solved!

(It is not surprising that I didn't guess this. I had no idea there was a nearby airport. Trenton itself is about ten miles west of there, and its main airport, Trenton-Mercer Airport, is another five miles beyond that.)

I have been wondering for years why those blobs were in that exact place, and I am really glad to have it cleared up. Thank you, Google!

Dear vision-impaired readers: I wanted to add a description of the view in the iframed Google Street View picture above. Iframes do not support an alt attribute, and MDN says that longdesc is “not helpful for non-visual browsers”. I was not sure what to do.

In the future, is there a better place to put a description of an iframed image? Thanks.

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