Human Bug Zapper

Caveat up front: There is no real purpose to this little story, other than it was very surreal for me this morning and I wanted to share.

I woke up this morning at 0430hrs, because I was departing for the Western Highlands to do some advance work on some sites scheduled for excavation. I kicked into my normal routine of making the coffee and grabbing the IPad to read up on what's going on in Twitter, FB, etc.

Around 5:00, I heard a boom that I thought could be a backfire, a gunshot or a firework from outside, but it wasn't enough to get me off the couch.  A few minutes later, I heard another, and through the window I saw a flash of white light.  I got up and looked out the window, but didn't see anything and returned to the couch.  Shortly after that, I heard another boom and got up again.  This time I saw that there was a bare power line somewhere down on one of the backstreets of the apartments.  I couldn't see the exposed area because there was a building obscuring my view.  After standing for a minute, I saw the lights of a vehicle go by and as it passed into the obscurity of the building I saw another white flash and heard a boom.  I watched three more vehicles go by with the same effect. 

In Vietnam, most vehicles traveling down back streets are motorbikes, so I couldn't help thinking that these bikes were getting zapped (and these were huge flashes of white light) and the drivers were piling up on the other side; not much unlike dead bugs in the bottom of a bug zapper.  There didn't appear to be any harried movement of people warning others, and as a matter of fact I didn't see anyone moving other than the few vehicles that went by.  It just seemed very strange that no emergency vehicles went by and I saw no fire trucks. 

After the fourth vehicles got zapped, everything got quiet and I didn't hear anymore booms.  I went ahead and got ready for my day, packed the rest of my gear and left the house.