On Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 3:24:09 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Thu, 19 May 2016 12:00:20 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

On 5/19/2016 11:54 AM, philo wrote:
Many years the utility pole directly behind my house got a direct lightning
hit. I was in the kitchen and almost lost it when I observed the simultaneous
lightning and thunder!

As a kid, I used to play the "5 second game" (flash-to-sound) during
Tstorms. One evening, the house "shook" as I saw the flash. I.e.,
too startled to even think of "counting". Of course, had I tried
to count, I wouldn't have made it past "0"! :

Next morning, noticed lots of bark on the ground beneath one of the
walnut trees adjacent to the living room. "That's odd". Looked up
to see the bark peeled off one side of the tree all the way to the
top!
"Ah! That must have been what shook the house!"

My answering machine was on the closest run to the outdoor wiring and was taken
out...but nothing else in the house was damaged.

We had a "nearby" strike when living in Denver (no idea how close it was as
I was at work at the time). It took out the protection network in one of
our (cheap) "electronic" telephones -- resulting in a perpetual off-hook
indication (annoying cuz every time I tried to call home, the line was
"busy"!). Also magnetized the screen in our TV. Took many weeks of
the built-in degausser operating to restore color purity!
The house on the farm where my mother grew up had no electricity and
was dwarfed by a HUGE Oak tree, about 3 times as tall as the house and
some 18 feet in circumference at chest height. They had both a well
and a cistern on the "back porch" - opposite side of the house from
the oak, and a big bank barn on the other side of the tree - house and
barn both festooned with lightning rods. All rhis perched on the top
of a hill, no-less.
Several times the cystern pump or well pump were struck, and on at
least one occaision the ligtning jumped from the pump, through the
back door,to the aluminum edging on the kitchen counter, to the wood
cookstove, to the water pump on the kitchen sink - on one occaision
going through an enamelled steel dipper and blowing off the enamel on
the earth side about the size of a silver dollar. The oak was struck
numerous times, and fire-balls flying around the yard during a
thunderstorm were not at all uncommon. Who knows how many times either
the house or barn took a direct hit - and never a fire, although it
did blow part of the roof off the barn at least once.


Forward ahead 50 years or so, and friends who also live at the top of
a hill on a farm were having problems keeping electric fence chargers
functioning, because with about 2 miles of fence connected, a
lightning strike anywhere within 3 or 4 miles would induce such a
charge on the fence that it would kill the charger. We ended up
installinf an air-core choke and spark-gap lightning arrester on the
fence and in a storm you could see the spark jump the gap to ground
and the fence-charger l;ived another day.

When I was a kid growing up on the family farm on the mountaintop in Northeast Alabamastan, lightning was a constant menace. I remember being in the basement of the house when I would hear an arc jump from the metal heating duct that ran the length of the house to one of the 6" steel poles supporting the center beams that ran down the center of the house. I could often count more than 10 seconds before I heard thunder. The house is 100 yards from the tallest point in the area so we were up there in the clouds. Baby brother who is 50 years old lives there now with all the critters in the woods. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle Thundering Monster