Or better yet ball lightning.

Probably some of the grounds on the poles carrying the lines are broken, these grounds dissapate any induction that occurs on the non-energized equipment. this induced voltage can be upwards of 1000v.

Keep calling your utility and have your friends call. One utility had a lawsuit against them (which they lost) where the exact thing was happening to a farmers cows and they stopped giving milk. he sued and after a long period of time they repaired/made changes.

This is no joke, as the prob gets worse not better over time.
Sfene

an old-fashioned notion about electricity

"...for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leak. Nothing could ever clear this up for her."


James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times"

What did the utility company say?

I like the induction theory - the spinning wheels and steel going through the electromantic field.

Joe

+1 Electricity is not that mysterious (ball lightning being the exception). Those lines probably were 50KV or more. Atmospheric conditions were probably just right (wrong) for your bike to act as a generator while cutting the electro-magnetic lines of force about the power lines. If your wheels were rotating at the right (wrong) frequency, the phase of the current generated may have left your bike with a polarized electrical charge. The arcs between the bike and your body were trying to neutralize the difference in electrical potential between your (non-conductive) body and the (conductive and charged) bike. Once your body acquired a charge, it caused the arc between you and the (grounded) guard rail.

Since the electrical transmission and generating industry considers these fields "non-harmful," they aren't interested in making any changes. In fact, making such changes would require a radical change in the way electricity is transmitted in the country.

It is an undisputed fact, however, that electro-magnetic fields ALWAYS exist around power lines of any voltage. In fact, the power companies have had to go after homeowners whose property is in proximity to such lines and who place transformers in the field of the line to obtain free electricity!

In the future, just ride under the line(s) at a faster or slower pace than you did last time. Although this won't prevent the problem, it should significantly minimize it.

What about the gas station? If someone cycles in to get air, and they dismount near a car being filled...

Obviously not a likely scenario or we'd have a gas station a week near power lines going up in smoke. What happend to the OP is possible, but rare. I suspect he (she) could ride under those power lines a hundred times and only once would the phenomenon occur again.

This thread reminds me of a call I fielded during my stint at IBM. IBM sold a beautiful Netvista X41, a rather expensive all-in-one PC which incorporated the hard drive and system board stacked behind the LCD display. The disk drive and CD-ROM drive dropped down from inside the stand that supported the monitor. This created the illusion that the computer was simply a keyboard and monitor, and looked very clean. Especially when bundled with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It was no secret to those of us in the know that the RF shielding of this computer was minimal at best, though I can't go into detail as to the problems that caused. Suffice it to say, such a design makes the task of adequate RF shielding nearly impossible, and IBM did an admirable job. You just can't have your cake and eat it too.

On to the call. A customer had one of these beauties that would act up. They had another IBM computer in a steel tower case which did not act up at all. We had sent out replacements, and they failed as well. Really odd behaviour that couldn't be reproduced, but made the computer unusable. The customer went through the effort of having the place rewired, giving the X41 its own grounded outlet, but oddly, the problems persisted. After all this, including product exchanges at IBM's expense, I discovered the cause of the problem: This customer had this computer set up in a trailer located directly under live high-voltage overhead power lines. These did not affect the computer housed in a steel case, but were causing the X41, with much less RF shielding, a wide array of odd and unusual problems.

I'd think you'd have to be uncomfortably close to the person fueling their vehicle. Whenever static discharge has caused a fire at a gas station, it's been where the person filling the car grabs the nozzle and discharges on that nozzle, where there's a high concentration of gas fumes. I would think that most motorists would object to a cyclist dismounting that close to them.

Rode thru their again today. No shock! A little weiry about going their again but it such a great ride it worth it.
Thanks for all of your replys, Joe

I ride under high tension lines in my area and the humming is LOUD !!! And you can sometimes feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up !!

This almost sounds like a job for MythBusters!