I’m glad no one was home when the lighting struck. Who knows how many places in that house were zapped with electrons (see previous post).

Since then, the phones have not worked, yet emergency services kept responding to phantom 9-1-1 calls. Phantom 4-1-1 calls have also been made based on the phone bill! The police threatened (as heard through the neighbor who actually talked to them) to call the phone company and have the service turned off if any more calls were made.

So the phone company finally made it out for repairs. (OK, they were never actually called for repairs until recently, but c’mon!) They were supposed to arrive between 8:00 am and 1:00 pm; they drove up around 5:30 pm.

I’m not certain, but I think every dwelling has both a box buried in the lawn near the street and a Network Interface box on the outside of the house. The line from the buried box to the house was dead.

After leaving several large holes in the lawn, they determined that a new line would have to be run from the box in front of the neighbors house, to the in-laws buried box, then all the way to the side of the house.

I asked them to check the inside lines as well. After fiddling with the box outside the house, he asked me to go in and plug in a phone. (I guess this would close the circuit and allow him to test; there is no dial tone with the buried line being out.) I couldn’t do that as the phones inside were fried by those surging electrons, so he gave me a little device to plug in. One of his little devices told him “11 feet”, so we trooped into the garage where he started jacking with the outlet there. When he attached clips to the lines, a strange warbling electronic sound was heard; from this he deduced the alarm system was the culprit. This was odd, as there is no active alarm system in the house. Nevertheless, the defunct system was shorted and causing problems. When I informed the tech there was no alarm system, he promptly bypassed those wires.

To make a short story long, phone service should be restored by the time I get home. The lines are supposed to be buried this morning and if the inside lines are fine as stated, it should be good to go.

My friend Shawn recently sent an email with pictures of people holding the power of the sun in their hands, like this:

Someone responded with the comment “thanks Shawn. I think I’m blind now.” Shawn could never let a comment like that go by!

“You’re not supposed to look DIRECTLY at the pictures! Jeez, isn’t your husband an eye doctor or something?”

Head over here and check this site out.

Especially watch this video, the very last part is unbelievable.

The in-laws live in a different city, but bought a house near us to live near their grandchildren when they retire. They are gone most of the time, but I go over there from time to time to collect the mail and check on the house.

Today, I received a call from the neighbor who mows the yard; shingles had blown off and were in the yard again. I head over there, expecting to just nail a few back in place, and see this:

Wow, that’s alot of damage for a simple thunderstorm. Looks more like someone put a foot through roof.

Inside, it’s no better.

Even hail wouldn’t do that!

Then I notice the duct. Now keep in mind, it’s dark up in that attic, and I did not have the camera at that point. In the dark, it looked a little charred, which I found very odd.

You can see from the picture above that there was definitely high heat involved.

It damn near severed that heating/ac duct!

Well, the neighbor seems to believe this was a lighting strike, and I’m inclined to agree. Notice that it struck the hanging bracket for the duct, which is made of metal.

I patched the hole as best I could, and with the neighbors help, covered it with ill-matching shingles. As of this writing it has already started raining, and we are supposed to have further thunderstorms tonight. Hopefully, this patch will hold until they can get the roof replaced.

Lighting, imagine that. This could have been much worse. It does lead one to question the intelligence of using metal in the attic for hanging ductwork.

Also of note, certain outlets in the house/garage are not functioning, and the telephone will produce no dial tone.