Garden flag pole hit by lightning

[Mads Barnkob]

This is a picture of a flag pole from a neighbor of my parents.

Lightning struck the flag pole approximately 200 meters from my parents house, yet their RCD on the mains supply was knocked out, but not soon enough to save some electronics. Their router died and a few other small electronics, but not bigger stuff like washer, fridge etc. It was only equipment that was on the network that suffered, so it might have been a transient injected in the network and not the mains that killed the equipment.

Sorry for the picture-in-picture, but that is how some people get a image from one device to another 

[oneKone]

wow.... that's insane! I've never seen anything it by lightening before. the amount of energy required to shred the pole must be huge?   

[Phoenix]

Wow, very impressive!

I have also had an experience with injected transients by lightning. I was sitting in my room and charging my notebook with the wall adaptor during a thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning struck into a pole about 150m away. This caused a small 2cm spark to appear between my arm and the aluminium case of the notebook.

Luckily, i was not hurt in any way. The spark was about as powerful as from a car ignition coil. It was quite painful, but not dangerous. The RCD also tripped but my notebook survived with no harm. I think the overvoltage was only present on the metal case and not inside the sensitive electronics and therefore, it survived.

This experience taught me to never use any electronical devices connected to the wall socket during a thunderstorm. If the lightning had struck a closer object or the powerline, i could have been seriously injured...

[OakleyC]

wow that's so cool! We had a lightning storm a few days ago and i got some nice fractal pictures. Never had lightning close though, always been 40km+ away

[profdc9]

I have had a tree near my house literally exploded into splinters by lightning.  The trunk was 45 cm or so in diameter, so it was not small.  It was quite impressive.  The branches were kind of scattered around.

Also, I have lost electronics to lightning strikes.  Cable modems, routers, even my JTAG debugger for some reason got zapped, and the port of my laptop it was plugged into went bad.  However my television and the rest of the laptop was ok.

My current ham antenna rises 30 meters into the air, and Florence is knocking at the door.  Of course I have two ground rods and a lightning protector, but a direct strike there's no guarantees.

Dan

This is a picture of a flag pole from a neighbor of my parents.

Lightning struck the flag pole approximately 200 meters from my parents house, yet their RCD on the mains supply was knocked out, but not soon enough to save some electronics. Their router died and a few other small electronics, but not bigger stuff like washer, fridge etc. It was only equipment that was on the network that suffered, so it might have been a transient injected in the network and not the mains that killed the equipment.

Sorry for the picture-in-picture, but that is how some people get a image from one device to another 

[Milnes]

wow that's so cool! We had a lightning storm a few days ago and I got some nice nootropics and fractal pictures. Never had lightning close though, always been 40km+ away

Man, that snapped like a twig. How comes it hit the pole near the base btw? Is that common?

[station240]

Looks like a fibreglass pole to me, the only metal part would be the base.

I've seen lightning strike a power pole directly.
Scored a direct hit on a 66kV overhead line, then took off in the direction of the substation.
It's arrival being shown as a brief wispy smoke cloud hanging over the station.
I called the power company, they were worried, they sent a helicopter!
Power was restored soon after.

Went past later to see what they had fixed.
The lightning had jumped from the 66kV cable into the 11kV switch yard.
A small transformer had two brand new fuses, it powers all the control and switching systems.

So where did the smoke come from ?
Yeah they found out 2 weeks later all 3 brand new underground 11kV cables had been damaged, and needed the first 50M of each dug up and replaced.