Lightning strike 2 houses down from me....

[BabaBooey]

3:30 this morning I was awakened by a window shaking boom and 10 min later heard the firetrucks....

House was empty so nobody was hurt.

edit: I went a bought a lottery ticket today,feeling lucky today...

 

[SearchMaster]

Looks like the lightning rod in the front yard didn't do its job.

I'm glad no one was hurt, OP. Lightning is some scary shiz.

 

[novasatori]

man talk about a bad day

 

[lokiju]

That's a really small looking house.

Thankfully it was unoccupied.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Woah, that's crazy. When you think about it though it's pure luck that this does not happen more often.

 

[Wyndru]

That sucks.

I hate lightning. My sister's neighbors house burned down last year because of lightning, and our yard got hit this year. It passed the giant tree we have and put a burn mark across my lawn right next to the house. It made me realize how easy it is for a house to get struck. I always thought it would just hit the tree.

 

[JTsyo]

No rod on the chimney?

 

[PottedMeat]

are those two tree trunks growing out of the foundation???

 

[Codewiz]

My mom lives in an old neighborhood. Each house has a street light out-front that is controlled by a switch inside.

When I was about 12, lightning struck the light outfront and ran inside. It burned up a ton of outlets and smoke started billowing out of the walls. Luckily nothing really caught on fire. Light bulbs did explode right next to me.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Neighbor's house across the street from me has gotten struck twice in 5-6 years. Each time it causes damage to the houses around it (including mine). The last strike (a year ago last December), blew their main breaker and meter off of their house. The damages to the12 homes around it included satellite, cable and telephone utility damage. I lost a flat panel TV, PS3, cable modem and router and switches.

It took three business days to repair most of the damaged homes.

 

[Schadenfroh]

My goodness, burned right through it. I was upstairs in my parents' house as a child when a bolt of lighting struck either our house or somewhere in the backyard. My neighbor was outside at the time and says it struck the roof.

The room filled up with a blinding purple light (not white at first), brightest that I have ever seen. There was a fraction of a moment as my mind seemed to lag and I thought that some kind of supernatural event was occurring (probably too many episodes of The X-Files).

Then, the loudest boom that I have ever heard (and I have attended NASA rocket engine tests) hit me. There was no damage to the house, although it did screw up my father's CRT monitor on his PC.

 

[Sluggo]

Couple of years ago my neighbors lost everything electronic in their house. All TVs, appliances, video games, well pump and it even fried the dog's wireless fence system. All said and done, tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You know this is something I've never considered, but do cheap surge bars even protect against lightning? What about those whole house surge protectors you can buy that install before the panel?

 

[Zedtom]

We had a strike last week in our front yard. It hit a tree fifteen feet from the house. The blast blew a lot of the bark off and caused several fractures. The forestry department came out and said that the sap had been boiled out of the tree and it was dead, so they removed it. I miss the tree, but I'm glad it didn't hit the house.

 

[jupiter57]

Looks like the lightning rod in the front yard didn't do its job.

404:Lightning rod not found.
You mean the Flagpole?

 

[DirkGently1]

Yanks really don't know how to build houses do they?

 

[Schadenfroh]

You know this is something I've never considered, but do cheap surge bars even protect against lightning?

No, a direct hit will still destroy the electronics, but they might help with indirect hits.

 

[HybridSquirrel]

lightning struck the fire hydrant right outside of my house...thing blew up at least 50ft into the air and landed in the middle of the street causing water to gush out....i thought it was the most awesome thing to witness first hand.

Couldn't even tell there was lightning it was so fast, and especially being 15ft away from it was scary as shit.


That house got fucked up though..

 

[HardcoreRobot]

lightning struck the fire hydrant right outside of my house...thing blew up at least 50ft into the air and landed in the middle of the street causing water to gush out....i thought it was the most awesome thing to witness first hand.

Couldn't even tell there was lightning it was so fast, and especially being 15ft away from it was scary as shit.


That house got fucked up though..

Yanks really don't know how to build fire hydrants do they?

 

[HybridSquirrel]

Yanks really don't know how to build fire hydrants do they?

people clean them out in cars all the time and it sends water shooting up into the sky...


so no, they dont

 

[SearchMaster]

404:Lightning rod not found.
You mean the Flagpole?

Yes, twas just a joke.

I was cleaning out my storage shed a couple of years ago and a storm moved in VERY quickly, it went from sunny and clear to raining and thunder in the time I went in to eat lunch. I was moving some of the items back into the shed to get out of the rain and lightning struck very near by. I literally screamed like a little girl. I never found where it hit exactly but it took out a lot of electronic equipment in my house (hot tub control panel, two wireless routers, HDMI jack on my TV, two UPSes, and some other stuff).

 

[ElFenix]

No, a direct hit will still destroy the electronics, but they might help with indirect hits.

wasn't there a thread in highly technical recently about how surge protectors work?

seemed to me people weren't careful enough about what's protected and what wasn't is the main problem.

(hot tub control panel, two wireless routers, HDMI jack on my TV, two UPSes, and some other stuff).

why is it the hdmi jack that always burns out?

 

[Newbian]

He must had pissed off mother nature.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

why is it the hdmi jack that always burns out?

In this case... probably because something was plugged into the HDMI port...

 

[ElFenix]

In this case... probably because something was plugged into the HDMI port...

which is wired to the rest of the tv