Lawyer-Wearing-Yarmulka

Last Thursday night, around 9:20 P.M., lightning struck my house. Kaboom! The whole house shuddered and within a few moments I realized the extent of the damage. One of the computers starting painfully wailing with a blue screen of death and the speakers emitting a painful klaxon. The other flickered for a moment and came back to life. The internet was down, and my Wi-Fi router was destroyed. Two out of three televisions were fried as well. (thankfully, the 37 inch LCD was spared. Telephone service was knocked out. The roof antenna was damaged. The ethernet cards on both my desktops were destroyed. Somehow the computers themselves survived.

So now it's Monday and phone service has been mostly restored, I'm one coax cable splitter away from television, but Time Warner isn't showing up till Wednesday to fix the internet. Till then it's painfully slow dial-up at home. Hopefully the new router and ethernet cards I ordered will show up soon. I think I'm going to stay late at work today and tomorrow.

Ouch!

No surge protectors?!

Surge protectors protect against spikes in the electric system. Here the lightening went through the coax and ethernet cables. The surge protectors were bypassed.

My understanding is that a surge protector won't protect against a lightning strike anyway. They only go up to a certain amount.

I had lightning hit a house about 2 feet away from where I was taking a nap on the couch. Blew out half the lights in the room, and the house's gutter looked like a bunch of pinholes had been drilled through it.