Blitzen!

Sorry for the lack of communication … but we had a very interesting start to our (my) weekend. Thursday night a little storm blew up. It was over with in a very short period of time but Mother Nature showed us some of her best fireworks. One of them went astray and hit our house.

We were down in the playroom (basement) after dinner, hanging out. We knew the storm was blowing up and we’d nixed our after dinner walk. There’d been a couple of booms and cracks and it was obviously a pretty powerful storm. Then came another very very loud crack, immediately followed by our alarm system going off. We assumed it was a vibration thing, but it didn’t stop. So Matt went to check it out and in our master bedroom, he smelled burning, so we evacuated to the car with the kids, dog and fileserver and drove around to the front of the house. Matt had called 911 and four firetrucks showed up.

A while passed, chatting with neighbors, etc. and the firefighters (hot ones) geared up and checked out our house. They were up in our attic and surveying the roof with their infared tools. They could show us the studs, sans fire, happily on their displays and we were pretty lucky.

The lightning struck through our eve, not into a room. Pieces of our roof were all over the neighborhood, up to a half-block away. It took out a speaker in the ceiling of our master bedroom and traveled through the speaker wire to burn out the volume control. It took out my Tivo (waaaah!), upstairs TV and most of the electronics attached to our main-floor theatre system as well as our networking equipment (wireless router + switch). It took out cable, phone and internet as well as killing our phones themselves and our alarm system and the light fixture in the master bedroom. It tripped a few breakers and took an entire GFI circuit (had to be replaced).

All in all we got off easy. It will be a bit of a pain to right everything, but nothing irreplaceable was lost and no one was hurt. It is a small thing in the long run, but it makes for a good story.