Missing in Action: Lightning Strike, all is chaos

Shepherd

Shepherd

Final Approach
Joined
Nov 24, 2012
Messages
5,569
Location
Hopewell Jct, NY
Display Name
Shepherd
Home Airfield
KPOU
Lightning hit 40 feet from my house, arced to the catv wire, and destroyed all the phones, computers, networking gear, cable boxes, TVs, everything network connected. The EMP even fried my cell phone.
So ths.e only thing for me to do was go to the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome Jamboree for 3 days, and wow them with a pair of Cub doing their thing in formation. As soon as I get a working computer, etc. I'll post some picture. This will have to do for now. This old Tablet is just agonizing to use.cubformation.jpg
 
Wow! So sorry. Curious if you had your computer on a UPS and if it failed. Glad no human was hurt.
 
When Nature takes your technology away, there's nothing better than to go out and kick it old school.
 
Rushie said:
Wow! So sorry. Curious if you had your computer on a UPS and if it failed. Glad no human was hurt.
Click to expand...

Makes no difference in such a direct hit.

Those are for a strike a mile upstream in the power line.
 
Annual occurrence here, feel your pain.
No the UPS/surge protectors don't prevent loss but some of them do come with a damaged equipment warranty.
 
Also, your odds are much better if the surge protection includes the network wires (for a wired connection).
 
weilke said:
Those are for a strike a mile upstream in the power line.
Click to expand...
Yep, first week of July took a hit on the power line feeding the airport. A lot of electronic items don't like that. Damaged the electronics in the entry gate and fuel farm lighting. Took out a couple of GFI's in my hangar.
 
All the electrical is on surge protectors, so of course, it came in on the cable TV wire.
I had ordered a couple of cooper to fiber media converters and a couple of meters of fiber cable so I could isolate all my CAT6 ethernet cables.
It arrived the next day.
Sigh..

I really need to put the media converters on the CATV cable, and isolate everything, but I haven't found anything yet.
Anyone have a source?
When I asked the cable people about it, they just said "Huh?"
 
A local law office (for which I used to run the network) suffered a hit to the CATV cable. It trashed everything (and blew several of the cable junctions to bits). Probably $100K in damage, including most of the UPS boxes! A million or so volts can jump quite a gap.
 
Worse ways to compensate for your loss Shepherd! Visited Rhinebeck 5-6 years ago, enjoyed it immensely. Been wanting to since around 1974 so great to finally check it out, and also saw Bad Company & Doobie Brosthers at Woodstock in concert too. That's a win win!
 
Last edited:
Shepherd said:
All the electrical is on surge protectors, so of course, it came in on the cable TV wire.
I had ordered a couple of cooper to fiber media converters and a couple of meters of fiber cable so I could isolate all my CAT6 ethernet cables.
It arrived the next day.
Sigh..

I really need to put the media converters on the CATV cable, and isolate everything, but I haven't found anything yet.
Anyone have a source?
When I asked the cable people about it, they just said "Huh?"
Click to expand...

Awwww:(
 
Shepherd said:
I really need to put the media converters on the CATV cable, and isolate everything, but I haven't found anything yet.
Anyone have a source?
When I asked the cable people about it, they just said "Huh?"
Click to expand...

You're almost certainly just going to have to put a surge protector on the line and just consider the modem to be sacrificial and then isolate it from damaging anything else.
 
Last time we had a close call it fried one TV. I thought about a whole house surge protector after that but tempting fate is cheaper and easier. Brazos County has the second highest lightning strikes per county in the US. Fate is the hunter???
 
weilke said:
Makes no difference in such a direct hit....
Click to expand...
Faced with the awesome destructive aftermath of a lightning strike up close, it is tempting to be fatalistic regarding the process, and outcome, of it all. But, with a bit of Ben Franklin-level electrical theory, and years of experience in, e.g., cell tower protection, ordinary folks can and do protect themselves quite well from atmospheric electric phenomena.

The IEEE book previously referred to is pretty good regarding mitigation strategies. For more on motivation, and the magnitudes of energy involved, I like the work of the amateur radio community. Lots of these guys have experience in the cellular tower business. There are 100,000 cell towers in the US; each one of them is engineered to be the tallest thing in its neighborhood. They are routinely struck by lightning, and survive quite handily (For the most part. Failures get the tower maintenance guys booted off the job but quick.).

The lightning bolt can be seen as a bunch of electrons returning to earth from the ionosphere. Figure 25,000 amps; a lot of current. But it's only for a millisecond or 2. You don't need inch-thick copper cables to conduct lightning-level current; #4 is fine, 4-inch strapping is better.

The essays at w8ji.com/lightning.htm are instructive. The topics of earth ground, single-point ground, and bonding are argued, and backed up with dramatic pictures. [He has a 300' tower in his back yard, and a dozen or so antenna cables entering his house. Yes, it's extreme.].

Regarding the original poster's experience: sorry about the loss of your networked stuff. I witnessed a direct stroke on my antenna lead-in wire when I was in college; destroyed my receiver, blew out portions of the plaster wall, and melted some AC wiring. Made me a nut on lightning protection.
 
Father's house had a lightning strike within 100yds or so and it took out both of his Pioneer Elite Home Theater AVRs. Interestingly, it killed the HDMI card in both of them, but otherwise they were completely functional. One of them even has all of the source buttons constantly lit up (only supposed to light up the source you're listening to). However, the cost of filing the insurance claim was about the same as replacing two $1K AVRs, so he just lived with it for a few years until he decided to upgrade to get the HDMI back.
 
Jim Hanlon said:
Faced with the awesome destructive aftermath of a lightning strike up close, it is tempting to be fatalistic regarding the process, and outcome, of it all. But, with a bit of Ben Franklin-level electrical theory, and years of experience in, e.g., cell tower protection, ordinary folks can and do protect themselves quite well from atmospheric electric phenomena.

The IEEE book previously referred to is pretty good regarding mitigation strategies. For more on motivation, and the magnitudes of energy involved, I like the work of the amateur radio community. Lots of these guys have experience in the cellular tower business. There are 100,000 cell towers in the US; each one of them is engineered to be the tallest thing in its neighborhood. They are routinely struck by lightning, and survive quite handily (For the most part. Failures get the tower maintenance guys booted off the job but quick.).

The lightning bolt can be seen as a bunch of electrons returning to earth from the ionosphere. Figure 25,000 amps; a lot of current. But it's only for a millisecond or 2. You don't need inch-thick copper cables to conduct lightning-level current; #4 is fine, 4-inch strapping is better.

The essays at w8ji.com/lightning.htm are instructive. The topics of earth ground, single-point ground, and bonding are argued, and backed up with dramatic pictures. [He has a 300' tower in his back yard, and a dozen or so antenna cables entering his house. Yes, it's extreme.].

Regarding the original poster's experience: sorry about the loss of your networked stuff. I witnessed a direct stroke on my antenna lead-in wire when I was in college; destroyed my receiver, blew out portions of the plaster wall, and melted some AC wiring. Made me a nut on lightning protection.
Click to expand...

Oh, no doubt, you can protect a home against lightning just as you can protect a mountaintop repeater site. My point was that it is naive to think that just plugging your computer into a $20 surge protected power strip or a consumer grade UPS is going to protect it from a direct strike.
 
Last edited:
Interesting. Two weeks ago, two trees and a power pole in our front yard took a hit. The nearest tree was about 10' from the house, had bark blown off and branches knocked down. Pieces of the power pole transformer were thrown about 50'. Our nearest neighbor lost some electronics and some LED light bulbs. The neighbor on the far side of him lost his fridge and a couple of other expensive bits. We lost nothing.

Our power from the pole is buried, where the neighbors' power is overhead. My theory is that the far neighbor's power wires were a longer antenna, hence he got the worst of it. Ours, buried, are no antenna at all. Not sure, though, since only the three of us were on that dear departed transformer so it could also have been the luck of the draw.

About two weeks before that I had put a VHF/UHF discone antenna on the roof, together with an omnidirectional cell phone booster antenna. These were about 20 feet from the near tree. I ran the two antenna wires through an entrance panel from this guy: http://www.kf7p.com/KF7P/EntrancePanels.html with transient arrestors on both and the panel gounded to a 10 foot ground rod about six inches away. Maybe $1300 worth of radios connected inside were completely unaffected by the hit. So I am feeling pretty smug right now.

It's nice being lucky.
 
Lightning is no laughing matter. A few cases here:

The house behind us got hit once (decades ago when we lived in the Denver area). Strike was on the chimney. Blew a few bricks off. My wife was on the patio turning something on the BBQ. You've never seen anyone open a sliding glass door, come in and close the door so fast in your life. Another storm and a house on the next cul-d-sac got hit and took out most of the stuff plugged into the power distribution system in the house. If that lightning was fired by an artillery outfit I was in trouble. Split the difference and fire for effect.

The company I worked for at the time (Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace) had build the reflector array for a solar power plant in the Mohave desert. A lightning strike a mile or two away took out line drivers and line receivers all throughout the array. Why? The wires were run in conduit that wasn't tied to ground at the ends. The induced current in the conduits reached the end and found a very high impedance. The voltage differential between the conduit and the wires resulted in the line drivers/receivers going away. Grounded the conduits at the ends and the problem did not repeat.

A fellow I worked with (also at MMA) had "lightning strike detectors" around his property in the front range. Lengths of wire with a few turns loosely turned in the wire with one end connected to metal fence posts. A nearby lightning strike would induce current in the wire and the magneto strictive forces would repel adjacent turns in the coils, resulting in straight wires.

Bottom line - lightning shouldn't be trifled with. Just one of many effects we worry about as EMC engineers. As we said at MMA, EMC engineers worry about everything from DC to daylight, thermal noise to lightning. :D
 
Ghery said:
Lightning is no laughing matter. A few cases here:
Click to expand...
I used to make a pretty good living replacing line receiver/driver chips in telco mux cards. Sometimes they were conveniently already blown off the board.
 
Terrible luck to have all that damage from a lightning strike. :(

I've heard that putting a 2-iron on your roof is a great preventive measure...because even God can't hit a 2-iron!
 
New phones and wiring in. New wireless router, 4 high speed switches and about half the cat 7 cable replaced. New TV and stereo/surround sound in and working.
Waiting on the delivery of the first computer. Should be here Monday.
Two more workhorse servers on order.
Ethernet ports on BluRay, X-Box, printer and other boxes all fried but wireless works on all of them.
 
And that's the very reason why I UNPLUG all electrical with the first sign of storms. Here in Missouri that doesn't happen all that much but while I lived in Florida, sometimes it was a daily occurrence. It gives me time to catch up on my reading!o_O
 
I
old cfi said:
And that's the very reason why I UNPLUG all electrical with the first sign of storms.
Click to expand...

I just bought 30K in lab equipment. The installers could tell from the logs that we unplugged the old stuff a lot “that’s bad, don’t do that”. We explained how the best UPS/surge protector is not going to help with what we experience (think Little House on a vast Prairie)
They persisted.
Fine. The equipment comes with 100% warranty for all hazards and I have backup plans in place, so let the ridiculously huge, noisy bolts rain down on it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top