Hot Air Balloon Hits High Voltage Power Lines

i am revising some of the points i made below, after watching agian he wasnt trying to ascent but was releasing his parachute to emty the air out of the envelope, also if the tanks had exploded there would of been a fireball hundreds of feet wide but instead a fire could of broken out but more likely is that the wires shorted and snapped which is what happens as one goes almost straight away tipping the basket followed by the others.

I'm a balloon PUT (pilot under training) and it appears the pilot did not try to ascend although this could be because he realised the inevitable and was hurridly trying to disconnect the fuel lines but if he had infact done that then that most probably would of prevented the explosion. Also please note there wouldn't of been much flame as when in concentrated amounts such as liqufied in a cilinder propane will not combust particularly well, as below the line you can see is the crown line running from the top of the balloon and finally power cables are extremely hard to spot from the air.

I've crewed and have flown on hot air balloons for the past 5 years. If that balloon had aluminum propane tanks, an explosion is very likely. The "wires" one sees as the basket plummets to the ground is not a wire, but a chord going from the basket to the top of the balloon. It's used to pull the top of the balloon out to deflate it. From the distance of the drop, however, a person could survive that fall. I'm not sure why the pilot didn't see the power lines and do a burn to rise above them, but that's not for us to determine. He/she may not have been looking in the right direction at the time. The pilot also could have been out of fuel at that point to prevent a burn.

can't you see the wires, the hollywood special effects....cmon he "lived" to tell the tale?

I don't reckon that the fuel tanks exploded. If they had, there would have been an enormous ball of fire. What you saw there was the electricity in the wires shorting out through the metalwork of the burner/cylinder assembly, causing the bright flash.
Nasty none-the-less.

SORRY...

oop's

and then what happend to them, did they live or die. HELLO???