Lightning strikes are no joke

So our street is without internet and TV. One of my neighbors had the covers blown off of his outside boxes.....the pieces were about 30 feet from the house.

 

Holy SHIT!! So the covers were blown off just from the juice jolting through his wiring?!

Where did the actual strike hit?

Check this out...

 

We think it hit the Frontier Fios hub.

 

Glad everyone is safe.

I had a tree struck within about 50 yards of the house. Never seen something that large glow and then explode before. Terrifying.

The creepy part came when I realized our central air conditioning turned on and then my neighbor called and asked if everything was okay because my garage lights were on. About 10-15 minutes later, everything shut off and life returned to normal.

It was all so strange and I'll never forget it. So crazy and humbling to realize how crazy lightening actually is.

 

Glad yall are good! It is a crazy thing to watch lightening and its destruction. I had a close call out west, but here its been mostly uneventful.

 

We had a strike here hit a very tall palm tree, maybe 200' from my house. Loudest fucking "CRRRAACK!" I ever heard.

Set the tree ablaze and car alarms going off all over the neighborhood.

 

Lightning struck the power pole behind my parents' house one time. After two weeks without internet and fighting with the cable company, they were finally able to get their fried modem replaced. They switched cable companies shortly after that.

 

When my wife was a kid, her family was camping in their tent trailer. Big storm one night and lightning struck a tree maybe 50' away. They jumped but didn't think too much of it. Got up next morning to find the tree had exploded. Apparently if the tree had been dead, the forest would have burned.

 

That is terrifying…..funny story. I have ocd and once I start a project, I have a hard time quitting until it’s done. We had a huge tulip poplar in our old yard and I decided to build a tree house and zip line for the kids. I was almost finished and the skies got dark, it got windy and it started to rain. My wife peeked her had out and asked me to come inside. I told her I only had a few more lag bolts to put in and I was done. It started to pour and thunder. Was out for about 15 minutes getting soaked…..but needed to finish. I packed up my tools, was walking inside and closed the sliding glass door. Turned around and asked my kids to look at the tree house…..as they’re coming to look a bolt of lightning struck the tree and blew the bark off of the tree onto the neighbors roof across the street. Had a tree service come out a few days later as the lightning scar spiraled down the tree and we were worried it would fall on the house. As they cut it down the pieces split in two because of the energy generated from the strike. They managed to keep the treehouse which my kids affectionately called the stump house until we moved. Needless to say I don’t mess with lightning anymore…..

 

Had lightning take out a handful of things in my house once, so I cascaded a bunch of SPDs - two service entrances and one in each subpanel. We get a lot of storms and nothing else has fried. Here's Siemens' current lineup: https://www.siemens.com/us/en/produ...rge-protection-devices/residential-surge.html

Oh, and at the time internet came through coax. Made the mistake of not routing that through the UPS and also fried a router.

 

What’s A lightning bolts favorite snack?




Shockolate

 

Wow, your wife deserves a nice dinner or shopping trip for that one.

That reminded me a sort of similar occurrence when we were out surfing one day... Me, my two best buds and one guy's son.

Waves were really fun but crowded. Same deal, sky grew dark and it started to rain... Hard. 90% of the time when it's raining the waves are really bad, stormy conditions. But every now and then you get these magic sessions in the pouring rain when it's just perfect.
This was like that, it got better when it started raining but almost everyone went in, so we had the pick of any waves we wanted. "YAYYY!!"

Started hearing some thunder, then saw a couple of lightning flashes waaaayy off in the distance. "Meh, whatever."

I look up and my buddies son was paddling toward shore and he was paddling so fast I swear he looked like one of those Jesus Bugs that just runs across the top of the water.

He got on shore and started yelling at his Dad to come in.

We caught a few more waves and all came in 'cuz he was visibly upset. We were kinda' laughing and telling him "It's no big deal, we've done this before. Lightning isn't gonna' strike us." I remember the then 16 year old saying "You guys are idiots" lol

Standing in the parking lot changing out of our wetsuits a few minutes later and "CRRAACKK!!

I didn't know where it was, but found out later that it hit just up the street (again, a tall Palm) in the yard of one of the beachfront homes, so maaaybe 60-70 yards from the water we were just in.

 

That’s scary stuff, love to watch from a distance but not as close as everyone is describing. Our neighbors house got struck a few years ago and their electrical box looked like what you showed. Unfortunately about 2 months later all of her kitchen appliances , tv, washer and dryer took a shit. Be sure to let your insurance know….just in case. Hope it doesn’t happen to you and glad everyone is safe.

 

According to the comments that's det cord and explosives under the water

 

Sonuvabitch, I've been duped again?!

 

I am behind on posting pictures but we discovered this from the lightning strike.....