Darn lightning....

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 01 Jun 2016 20:34:55 -0700
Brian Cluff <Brian at Snaptek.com> wrote:

 
> I wish I still had this CD ROM drive that I used to show off when
> lightning came up in conversation.  Most of the traces were
> completely melted off its circuit board... and the computer that it
> was plugged into was also plugged into a really nice surge suppressor.

Supposedly Central Florida, where I live, is the lightning capital of
the world. One day I sat on the front porch, enjoying a rainstorm, even
after my wife told me to come inside before I get struck by lightning.

Then there was one of those boom-flashes where the book and the flash
were simultaneous, my wife came to the front door, and told me our back
yard had been struck by lightning. Here's what I found:

There was a 15 foot and rising mushroom cloud of smoke rising from an
18 inch hole in the ground. A few feet from the hole was the metal dog
leash cable whose top pulley rode on a 50 foot horizontal metal cable
stretched between two trees. Several inches of the leash that had been
touching the ground were vaporized.

Following the horizontal cable, I saw that the tree on the right had
burn marks from where the cable was attached to midway up the tree, but
a tree about 6 feet away had burn marks from that height to its top.

The lightning had hit one tree, jumped to the tree with the horizontal
wire, across the horizontal wire to the vertical leash, down the leash
to blow a hole in the ground and vaporize several inches of the leash.
Luckily, our dog hadn't been on it at the time.

I found out later that my neighbor had been standing about 10 feet from
the trees that got hit, on his own property. The electrical field had
knocked him to the ground.

The itercom system that came with our house failed. Both trees that got
hit died a few weeks later.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21