Lightening and power surges are two entirely different animals. We experienced a rather severe power surge several years ago when a transformer fuse blew, and all it took out was our computer router, BUT lightening is a subject that many in the central plains are very familiar with, and it goes where it wants when it wants. I have seen it blow clocks to fragments and yet not touch a refrigerator that was plugged into the same outlet. I've also seen it blow the nails out of the end of a house and then follow the duct work until it came out through a wall and struck the clock sitting on top of a TV smoking both the clock and the TV. When lightening hits a barn filled with bales of hay that has been tied with wire the inferno that results is almost instant burning the stored hay from the center to the outside having followed the wire through out the stack. It will also hit a steel stake in the ground blowing a hole that may be several feet deep and a yard or more across.
Lightening will hit and follow a barb wire fence killing every animal standing next to it. It used to be that cars were considered to be a safe refuge in a thunder storm, but steel belted tires now blows that theory out the window as well, numerous car lightening strikes have been noted in Kansas the last few years, often leaving burn marks where it exited through a tire's tread to the ground. A friend of ours has lost two hay barns and the center of a wheat field due to lightening in the last 4 or 5 years. Connie was standing at the kitchen window and saw the lightening strike in the center of the field last summer or they might have lost the entire quarter section of grain, but they did loose one of their barns which was filled with fresh cut 300 dollar a ton hay a few days later. The only safe guard for lightening is to get it to go someplace else and that is why people have lightening rods installed. Lightening hit one of the lightening rods right over out bedroom where we were living in Oklahoma about 35 years ago, and I can tell you for certain that levitation is a human possibility. It shattered one of the decorative glass balls on the rod which was hit and left a burn mark around the ground buss where it entered the ground.
We live across the street from a Catholic church with a cross on the steeple, and I'd hate to venture a guess at how many time that cross must have been hit over the last 100+ years, but I can say for sure that it has been hit several times in the 20 years we have lived here.
Dale in the Flatlands.
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