Hurricane Sandy and YouTube: A perfect storm

Super storm Sandy or no super storm Sandy, there’s always time for YouTube.

On Monday, while the world waited with bated breath to see what the wrath of Sandy would bring, more than 30,000 videos related to the storm were uploaded to the video sharing site, according to YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca.

The most popular Sandy video on YouTube captured the dramatic explosion at a Con Edison plant in lower Manhattan that resulted in a blackout for most of the borough south of Times Square.

The video, which has been viewed more than 6 million times, starts off uneventfully, and if you are as impatient as I am you will wonder at first if you are watching the right one.

But then at second 20 you’ll see a flash of light and what looks like a bonfire raging in the distance. But the real “Holy cow!” moment doesn’t come until 31 seconds into the video, when a huge flash of blue light fills the screen.

As of Thursday, videos about Sandy had been viewed tens of millions of times, and The Weather Channel live stream that YouTube linked to from its home page had logged more than 13 million live stream views since Sunday.

One of our favorite videos from the storm, “Hurricane Sandy, 3 trees fall and fire” made it to the front page of Reddit under the heading, “Hurricane Sandy Video: First World Edition.”

It begins with a guy taking video of the stormy scene outside his window, and then turns into an eruption of “Oh my Gods” and “Oh my goshes” as he and his family watch a large tree in their front yard crack and topple onto a car and another tree fall on their next-door neighbor’s yard.

But be forewarned: Some of the language in the video is not family friendly.

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