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“It’s just a little rain.” Famous last words, spoken by yours truly about 15 minutes before lightening struck a tree in my neighbor’s backyard.

I happened to be home for lunch, and was in the kitchen at the sink when the Incident occured. MR was somewhere in the front part of the house (I think) and Reilly was in the den, looking more or less out the window. Once the tree was hit, things happened very quickly: Flash of light outside, a Crack! noise, various flashes and pops within the house as power surged and failed and then the unnerving quite that always happens during a power loss. Reilly was terrified by what he saw and was crying and yelling about the tree, Dobbs was freaked out by the sudden darkness and the noise (from brother, tree and storm), and MR and I were a bit stunned as we slowly started to piece together what had just happened:

The tree was struck, split and fell onto our powerline, ripping our connection and meter can off/out of the wall and pulling our breaker panel wildly askew. The surge in our house¹, instantly knocked out the power in the back half of our house, and shifted additional power to the front of the house². The surge did a couple of other things:

• It fried MR’s laptop, a TV, several baby monitor combos, an alarm clock and a cell phone
• It killed the transformer in our HVAC unit
• It melted the cable connection at the point where the external cable attaches to the internal
• It burned a hole in our water main. True story.
• It tore out an iron spike that connected our powerline to the house, moving several bricks in the process

The entire thing was out of a movie. When the firefighers arrived³, it was just like that scene in ET where the NASA guys show up all in their HASMAT suits and stuff: they walked right past me, did not speak or look at me, and moved up to the house. Quite scary.

Long story short - in about three seconds in a relativ ely benign storm, our house got beat up. We are still getting quotes to fix the bricks and the landscaping from the watermain work, etc, but we do have power, water and a roof over our heads, so we try not to complain. Oye.

1. Caused by some possible combination of simple power surge and lightening. «
2. The home was originally built as a duplex, so had dual electrical wiring. «
3. Because I called them, because the whole house smelled like smoke. «