"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
news
The actual answer of course is none it goes through the wires, but that
would be being pedantic.
Of course if like me you stood near a pylon when it was struck by
lightening you would see how well built they are!

I've never been near a pylon when it's been struck by lightning (*). I
wonder if it was the pylon itself or one of the phase wires that was struck.
I bet the bang is pretty impressive. The closest I've come was when a pylon
(maybe 66 or 132 kV) about 300 yards away was struck - there was a
ground-shaking bang and a very bright flash out of the window - much
brighter than normal lightning - and the power went off for a couple of
seconds and then came back on again as the circuit-breakers somewhere
upstream tried restoring power. I couldn't see any sign of blackened pylon
arm, so it may have been a strike on one of the phase wires.

Luckily I'd unplugged my PC a few moments before, as I noticed the storm
approaching - distant thunder got louder and the flash-to-bang time reduced
to a couple of seconds - so I escaped any damage.

Another storm, I wasn't quite so lucky: a minor flicker in the lights from a
fairly distant storm took out the power supply of my PC. As luck would have
it, I had a spare PSU on my desk which I keep in case any of my customers
have a faulty PSU, so I was able to swap it over. I'm quite proud of myself:
I have a weather station which updates its data in the log files every ten
minutes. The PC went down just after one reading and I had the PC back up
again, having swapped over the PSU, together with leads to each disk drive,
the CD drive, and the three leads to the motherboard, in time (just - it was
close!) for the next reading 10 minutes later. And probably about 2 minutes
of the time was taken up with the interminable time it takes my PC to boot
up and for the weather-station app to start reading data again.


(*) I have not-so-fond memories of cross-country running at school on a
route that took us under pylons. It was a really obnoxious route. You had to
endure the taunts of the local kids from other schools on the estate, then
run along a muddy, puddly unmade road, past the factory where they boiled up
animal carcases to make glue (trying not to puke at the smell), under the
fizzing pylon wires which often glowed a pretty mauve on a foggy day and
made your hair stand on end, and then try not to get savaged by the alsatian
guard dogs from the car breakers yard - and all of that was within about 1/4
mile. After that it got easier! https://goo.gl/maps/p1PNHJWtECk shows the
rusty girders which are all the remain of the glue factory, then the pylon
and then (to the left of where the car is parked) the place where the car
dump used to be. It all looks a lot less grotty than I remember it in the
mid 70s.