[galenwbritt]

I can kind of feel her pain.................the storm that killed 11 last night 200 miles southwest of here hit about 5 hours later at my place (1:00 a.m.) and had probably the best/worst lightning storm I have ever witnessed........and I grew up in the beginning of Tornado Alley. It seemed like it stayed "light as day" for a good 10-12 minutes solid while pouring rain and blowing like crazy. What was kind of weird was that there were no sounds (thunder) during the worst part of it........just lightning happening so fast in the sky I guess it had no time to add noise to it. LOL

I saw one flash that I could swear was less than 50' outside of my window and obviously was very loud. I was thinking that it had hit a transformer on a pole, but we don't have any in this back section of the subdivision. We lost lights and stuff for quite a bit, then about 15 minutes later when it subsided a bit it seemed to come back on as normal. Anyway, about 10 minutes later after that I heard a loud "POP" and could not figure out where it had come from. I could smell a bit of something that had been burnt and after looking around a bit noticed that my boys little TV wouldn't come on anymore. Weird, as all the other lights and electronics came on in the same room.

We woke up this morning to another TV totally shot, one TV that would come on but now has no sound and a cable modem that is shot. The modem was in the same surge protector strip that had the computer/monitor/speakers/etc. and all of those were fine. It is even the type of protector that has feeds for cables via phone and television to run into before outputting to the source. Still not sure what exactly happened as all I can tell was a late surge throughout our home wiring system and no matter whether an appliance was on or not, it was toasted. All this was upstairs as we haven't found anything wrong downstairs (yet).

Anyway, just thought I would share this little story on the power of storms even when you think either you are protected or that it has already passed.

Galen