Interesting pheonomena
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Last night there were several severe storms that rolled through my tiny burg. The first, at approximately 6 p.m. is the subject of this post.
As I was eating dinner, I noticed a brilliant blue flash just outside my window and jumped up from my meal to investigate. As I looked towards the source of the flash I saw a shower of electrical sparks coming from behind a neighbors home and the entire neighborhood went dark. I immediately grabbed the phone book and went outside on my porch to call said neighbors. As I was looking up the number I saw another neighbor go over to the house that had apparently been struck by lightening so I instead looked up AEP’s number instead.
As I was dialing AEP I heard something resembling 100 electric chairs going off at once and then a very loud and alarming ‘pop’ and another, much larger, blue flash of light that lit up the entire neighborhood. At this point I’m speaking with an AEP representative and she informs me that someone will be sent out to investigate. It was about this time that the first brief, but nasty storm was ending. I looked up and down my street and I saw each and every one of my neighbors outside.
I decided to walk up to the neighbors house that had been hit by the lightening and check things out. Apparently, the initial lightening strike that I saw had hit a tree in their backyard. When this happened, two very large branches splintered away from the tree. One branch landed squarely against an electrical pole, knocking two transformers askew and off of their mounts. The second branch fell over the power-line leading into my neighbors home. When the branch hit the line leading into the house, the line blew and the resulting ‘blast’ blew a hole in the eave of the house. The second flash I witnessed was the two transformers arcing back and forth amongst themselves. Scary stuff.
Anyway, the real point of this post is the fact that my neighbors actually came outside, and even more fascinating, we actually interacted with one another. Surprisingly, all of my neighbors are nice people. I didn’t know that before last night.
