House hit by lightning

[Midniteoyl]

Very glad you and family are safe. Scary situation for sure.

 

[PILOON]

I'm built on a site on which the previous house burnt due to a lightning strike.
(poor grounds).
I'm well grounded so fingers crossed.
Adjacent I have a TV antenna that I well grounded so I'd hope it would become sacrificial should mother nature try again.
Also my neighbor is much higher than I so I'd suspect he'd be first in line.
Not helping however is our elevation above sea level as we are the highest point in a 30 mile radius. (as per topographical maps)

 

[oosik]

Neighbor out plowing his wheat fields with a LARGE tractor. Tractor got hit - he felt a tingling sensation. I think he was just VERY lucky.

 

[Torvy]

One of my wife's grandmother's husbands died from a lightning strike. Another was hit by a train. The third husband just had cancer.

 

[notaz3]

About ten years ago we had lightning strike a palm tree that was next to the house. Lit it on fire and fire spread to house. Between fire and electrical surge we got a full house rewire, and kitchen / dining room remodeled.
We unplug electronics any time there is possibility of lightning.

 

[dstig1]

I had a coworker several years back whose house got hit by lightning while they were on vacation. Burned to the ground and they lost a lifetime - clothes, furniture, photos, computers.... No particular reason they got hit, just really bad luck.

 

[rbstern]

Neighbor out plowing his wheat fields with a LARGE tractor. Tractor got hit - he felt a tingling sensation. I think he was just VERY lucky.

If it's an enclosed cab and the supports are metal, and the roof is metal (or has metal spans), it probably acted as a Faraday cage, which keeps the current on the outside of the metal structure.

 

[rbstern]

^This.
Is the corner of the garage where it hit also the corner where your overhead electrical service attaches?
Sounds like the bolt got into your electrical system and used it’s ground to get to earth. Like trying to send 10,000 gpm down a garden hose. Pressure is going to build and spill out to everting connected.
I’d check your service ground to make sure that didn’t get fried.

If you’d had lighting rods and a lot more ground rods, it would of helped. But would it have saved everything? Probably not, hard to say, but probably would of reduced damage. A bolt whose electro-magnetic field takes out the ECU of a car in the garage is pretty powerful.

House is served by an underground feed, coming from a pad mounted transformer about 100' from the house.

Electrician who repaired the damage was thorough in his inspection.

 

[rbstern]

Wanted to add: Lots of discussion and mystery about surge protectors, and whether or not they work. I can tell you, they do work, as long as the power surge is within the capability of the surge suppressor. For the main garage circuit that got hit, unlikely anything available in residential surge protection products would work; it was a massive force, enough to unsheath 14ga wire from it's insulation, break a concrete wall, blow low fixtures off their mounts, etc. For other devices in our house, on other circuits, the devices were fried via a hard wired Ethernet connection (no surge protection).

The garage has a dedicated 20A circuit for outlets. So, imagine the power hits the lighting circuit, travels to the breaker box (about 100' away, as wire goes), and travels outbound on all of the other circuits in the box. Most breakers popped from the overcurrent, but not before the damage is done.

In the garage, I had a cheap, "outlet multiplier" style surge protector, which plugs in atop a typical outlet. Not sure what the surge rating was, but this was probably a $15 device. Plugged into that outlet were two devices that should have died: a Milwaukee M12 charger, and a Panasonic cordless phone range extender. Both with digital circuitry that should have easily fried.

The surge protector was dead as a doornail. The plugged in Milwaukee and Panasonic devices survived.