From: wtm@uhura.neoucom.edu (Bill Mayhew)
Subject: Re: Power Strip Surge Suppressors/EMI filters
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1992 03:15:49 GMT

In August 1984 my house was struck directly by a lightning bolt.
Much damage was done.  Of the phone devices, two 2500 telephone
sets, a similar wall phone and a modem survived.  A Radio Shack
answering machine and cordless telephone were trashed.  A
postmortem on the answering machine showed a vaporized surge tube
and many of the transistors were open; the microprocessor was shot
too.  In the cordless phone, there were two legs and a black scorch
mark where the MOV used to be.  Most of the ICs there were shot
too.

Luckily, the computers were untouched.

The cable TV block converter was trashed.  The TV screen was
magnetized and was a nasty purple when the set was powered back up.
I took the set in to work and used the degaussing hoop to clean it
up.  My parents now have that set and it is still working just
fine.  Never had to replace any components.

A digital wall clock stopped working.  The segments were out, only
a blinking colon remained.

The water in the pipes was turned orange - funny since the plumbing
is copper.

A lightbulb in an overhead fixture was vaporized - the glass simply
vanished, but the globe surrounding the bulb was fine.  The handle
of the wall switch controlling that light also vanished.

The lightning apparently came down the chimney, exploding parts of
several bricks, shooting pieces of brick trhough the roof.

The lightning apparently jumped out of the fireplace on the first
floor, popping a metal corner bead out of the plaster.  The heavy
curent flow of lightning in the silvering of a mirror above the
fireplace made the mirror explode. (Very nasty and quite a scare!)

The lightning also went into the basment and blew an access cover
off the chimney.  The lightning also popped a knob off my Tek 547
scope nearby in the basement.  I'm not sure if the knob coming off
was a direct act of the lightning or something flying out of the
chimney hit the knob.  I put the knob back on and the scope was
fine.

Soot came out of the chimeny and went everywhere.  Yuck!

The automatic garage door on the detached garage nearby was
triggered and the door opened.

About 1/2 the circuit breakers tripped off.

To cap it off, I called 9-1-1 and asked for the fire dept.  With
all the soot, it was hard to tell if anything might be burning.  I
was quite obvious that the chimney was involved and I feared there
might be a fire in the rafters.  The fire dept. arrived about five
minutes later.  The fire people jumped off the truck with axes in
hand and started to run to the house across the street where two
retired people were still asleep.  The fire people were about the
smash in the wrong door, but I caught their attention just in time.
It was not the best morning up to that point.  After the fire
people checked the house and roof, we made them coffee and cookies.
At least the Mr. Coffee still worked.  The lightning that hit my
house was an isolated bolt; the weather was misty, but not raining
and that was the only lightning strike.  Some luck.

As if a symbolic gesture, when I got to work, I turned on my
TVI-950 terminal and about five minutes later an electrolytic
capacitor on the video board exploded.

Bill


-- 
Bill Mayhew      NEOUCOM Computer Services Department
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    phone: 216-325-2511
wtm@uhura.neoucom.edu   (140.220.1.1)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics