Mildly OT: 8-volt 8N Has Nine Lives

This was a 25 ft. pole and only three or four pieces longer than four feet are left. The rest exists only as splinters, some of them two feet long and almsot as sharp as a stiletto, scattered out over a fifty-foot or so radius.

The winter grass, new spring growth, oats, etc., right at the base of the pole appear uninjured.

These spots seemed to be at regular intervals of the same length of the amount of pole left above the ground (approx. 5 ft.) and may represent nodes in the standing wave that must have existed in the length of the pole for some number of nanoseconds!

Most of the explosive work, though, was obviously done by steam as Dell says.

Splinters still attached to the pole are splayed out (like your hear does when you touch a Van de Graff generator) from the like charges on the splinter ends.