Bless Farmers Insurance once again for their full coverage of this damage. It totalled $7,000 and
I have lots of visual pictures to show what a direct lightning strike can do.
It was Labor Day
weekend, 2000, and a very strong thunderstorm was going through Foxfield at 1:30 in the morning. There were
many close hits and I was lying in bed praying that none would hit us. Sure enough, POW!!! And I
knew instantly that this was not a near miss. That sinking feeling again, that every ham knows occasionally.
The smoke detectors went off for about two seconds, everything went dark and quiet
except for a crackling sound. Almost a sizzle and then it faded away. It smelled like ozone.
We were both up like a shot to check out the damage. I had a lot of protection installed so I was
pretty confident that not too much had been hurt. It turned out that everything that had protection
was fine. Those items that somehow had missed being protected were wiped out.
This is the control in the garage where the lightning came inside. Notice the scorch on the
housing and the garage door opener wires vaporized.
The lightning came into the house on those white Romex wires. They make up the line that runs power to the motororized folding plate. I had
put a plug on the end and left it separated from the house wiring by two feet. I thought that would
do it but instead that turned out to be the breach.
Here we revisit the same outlet from above but with the transformer removed to show more of the scorch. This is
apparently the point where the lightning entered the AC lines and went on into the house.
The reason the strike was especially damaging was because lightning
jumped from those white wires to the telephone lines and AC wiring inside the garage. The phone line protection is on
the outside where the lines enter the house. Therefore lightning was past the protection and free to do all the
damage it wanted. That is where the most damage occurred.
Lightning ran into the ISDN equipment, wiped it out, continued on out the LAN wiring throughout the house
into four different computers.
It wiped out the LAN board and the motherboard on all four computers. That's where most of the
money came from on the insurance claim.
It left a permanent purple color on the big screen TV, and it wiped out the finals on my new
ICOM IC-756PRO.
Lightning does some amazing things.
This picture shows where the lightning was searching for any kind of a path to ground. This little metal
bracket isn't attached to anything and yet it has scorch marks. It must have had enough inductance to look like
a ground for an instant. Inductance has the characteristic of resisting instantaneous change in current(di/dt).
My friend, Bill Burick, KB0MPY, says after his strike he was finding damage as much as 6 months later. I
thought we had found it all til one night in December. All November we had been running our electric
blanket but I was never really warm. Then we had a real cold snap in December and I began to
realize the blanket wasn't working at all. It had been plugged in when the lightning hit and
wiped out, not to be discovered til three months later.
This is the exact point where the lightning struck. It is the center of the beam at the top
of my tower, up 105 feet. These were the only scorch marks on the tower and antennas.
My neighbor, Jan Abbott, says she just happened to be watching the storm from her window when my strike occurred.
She says she saw the bolt strike the top of the tower and then she saw a stream of sparks for about
3 seconds afterward. She said it looked like fireworks.
An extreme closeup of the
point where the lightning bolt hit. Notice the scorch. I am amazed that it was only scorched
and not vaporized.
Little by little, a little later we had replaced or repaired everything that was damaged
with the help of our insurance company. I am back to normal now with only pictures and memories
to tell the story.
Hopefully this is the last "disaster" for me for a long time.
2002 Update: Of course, I realize that when I
use the word "disaster" that it is tongue-in-cheek. I mean I know it's not really a
disaster in the big scheme of things. September 11th puts a lot of things into perspective and
many of us begin to understand that our "disasters" are really not too big a deal.
I have since installed a disconnect for the power lines at the base of the tower. Now those lines
that brought in the lightning are connected only when I am lowering the tower.
Next, I have installed telephone line and LAN wiring protection at each computer and the ISDN
device. If lightning
does strike again and comes in on the phone lines it will be arrested at each computer. I will
keep my fingers crossed.
2008 Update: We have had no further "disasters", thank goodness, and are way over due. We don't have our
ISDN line anymore but we still have ethernet surge protectors plus power line surge protectors on all our computers.
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