Birthday balloons are all life and colors. Fill them with helium and you are flooded with happiness for a day. Your birthday could be graced with the shiny Mylar balloons, and their creative shapes may be perfect for the day, only until you decide to release them in the skies for a show.
Mylar is a brand name for BoPET or biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate, a kind of plastic that is also used as a dielectric in foil capacitors along with other plastics. Mylar used in the balloons has a vapor deposit of aluminium that gives the material its shiny metallic look. The shiny metal, however, makes the material conductive and that is just the recipe for disaster if not handled with care.
In the boundaries of your house, away from any open power lines, the shiny Mylar ones are all good. A crew in Long Beach, California was working on power lines when they saw the balloons floating towards the lines. The crew members climbed down the pole for their safety but recorded the incident for our eyes to see. Watch the massive explosion in the video below:
