The story: Wednesday night, I was getting Erik to sleep and saw some lightning start out the window. I remembered the computer was plugged in, and I thought about going to unplug it, but I thought I'd let Erik finish nursing first -- the lightning seemed far off yet, and I couldn't hear any thunder.
I took Erik upstairs a few minutes later and heard one rumble of thunder. Uh-oh, I thought, and hurried back down to unplug my computer. I unplugged it, then shut it down (since the battery would last a while), then headed back upstairs to help get Sofi to sleep. I hadn't even sat down when I heard a BOOM and saw a flash -- I gasped, and then all was quiet for a moment, and then Sofi whimpered and started to cry. I stayed with her (Erik slept through the whole thing) while Dave went to assess the damage.
The lights in Sofi's room were still on, but the flash had been the bulb in the hallway burning out. That circuit's fuse had blown, as had another -- the top two in the box. Mom had heard a bit of thunder but hadn't thought to unplug her computer, or the DSL router or wireless router (which were all in a different part of the house from my computer). Her computer and the DSL router were shot -- no flicker of life whatsoever. The surge protector was shot, too -- it's apparently no match for lightning. The TV got some level of charge, and now has a funny-colored line through the top half of the screen.
But that was all in this old farmhouse. The new house was affected, too, though at first we didn't realize it. Dave went out and saw that every circuit that had been on was tripped, but he flipped them back again and they seemed to work OK. But he was working with a flashlight that night. The next day, he went out and checked again. Then he saw the damage to the stovepipe.
Around nearly every screw on the stovepipe is a blackened ring like this one. Some of the screw holes were made bigger, so that the screws are just sitting loose in the holes.Then he saw the damage to the tile below the stove.
The charge had followed along the metal trim around the base of the tile and blew out at the corner, damaging the tile.
This was all bad enough. We are hopeful that we won't have to replace the stovepipe, but we don't know for sure yet. Hopefully all we'll have to do is get bigger screws to fill the screw holes.Then, this weekend, we found problems in the wiring.
The yellow wire in this photo had been held in place by those little white staples; the power of the charge yanked it out of those staples and blew out the back of the junction box.
Three junction boxes were damaged, but this was the worst one.Don came up with a hypothesis that seemed plausible to the rest of us: The electricity came into the house through the wires, through those three junction boxes, then arced over from the last junction box, with its wires exposed ...
... over to the metal scaffolding. You can see how close the scaffolding was to the junction box in the picture below.
You can tell the scaffolding got some current because of the scorch marks on it:
And from the scaffolding, the arc must have jumped over to the chimney, and the metal around the tile. The stove, by the way, has no damage at all, even though it is mostly iron and could have carried a charge, too.All of this damage is a pain, but it can be fixed. We were pretty sure the damage was contained to those junction boxes, since the next box on that circuit had no damage (the scaffolding, serving as an indoor lightning rod, was between the two). Which is good, since if it had traveled much farther on that circuit, the wires are already covered with drywall.
Unfortunately, Dave and Don hadn't yet taken the cover off the electrical box. What they found was discouraging:
And there were some charred wire pieces that I didn't bother to get a picture of.We do have insurance on the house already, but we have a $1,000 deductible -- we probably won't hit that figure, unless the fixing the wiring in the box is more expensive than we imagine, or the stovepipe and chimney both have more damage than we can see at this point. (Mom and Dad, with the old farmhouse, are on a different policy, with a $500 deductible, and I don't think we'll hit that figure either.) I do count my blessings that I got my computer unplugged, as that, with all my software on it, as well as all my, Mom's, and Betty's Etsy pictures on it, along with all sorts of other files, would have been thousands of dollars (and hours) lost. (I'm very motivated to find an online storage system now!)
Dave was holding up quite well with all this until he saw that breaker box. Then he decided he'd had enough of the house for the day and headed out to fix fence for a while. The next step was calling an electrician, anyway, and there was no point in hanging more drywall in case the electrictian wanted to check some more wiring.
... So we've been having a discussion about lightning rods. Gary of Prairie Builders said no one puts them on new houses anymore. Dale, our neighbor, stopped by after church and said his farm house was hit by lightning when he was a kid ("Just like a bomb going off," he said) and that house did have lightning rods. He questions their effectiveness.
Online sources are contradictory. Some say they help; others say they don't. The lightning rods on the farmhouse were taken off last summer when the roof was reshingled; I do know that our phones have been knocked out twice in my memory from lightning strikes, even with the lightning rods, though that could have traveled on the lines from some distance, I suppose.
I have half a mind to try to do a freelance article about lightning and call some experts. Then the other half of my mind (which has a voice a lot like Dave's, oddly) tells me we've got enough to do already.
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