Thunderboomer
We had a dandy storm Thursday night through Friday morning–lots of rain and thunder. There was one clap of thunder that was louder than anything I had previously heard. It was an enormous explosion at precisely 4:00am on Friday morning (to be fair, it might have been slightly before that but when I looked at the clock on my computer it said 4:00am).
I was up and running and ready to volunteer at NORAD to protect my home from alien invaders. My laptop was providing the only light in the room and when I finally managed to orient myself I realized that there was a stink of burning plastic (or the like, it is hard to identify funny smells in the dark with a heart rate that has yet to recede below 200 beats per minute). Now I had to find the fire and figure out what had just happened (after a rather urgent need to urinate has been settled).
With flashlight in hand my wife and I wandered around the house looking for the fire. We walked outside and looked around. We wandered into the basement. We found nothing and gradually were calm and confident to go back to bed still puzzled at what had made the huge (emphasizing huge, big, loud, scary, thundering) noise and the funny smell, which had since dissipated and I was figuring that I had imagined it because waking up scared caused me to smell funny things.
It was dark, the power was out, and we slept the rest of the night very comfortably.
The next day the storm was gone and we waited for the power to come back. Our area was out (according to Maritime Electric) so we waited. We got suspicious around 6:pm when we saw lights on at our neighbor’s house and we were still without power. When we called Maritime Electric again they assured us that everybody had power … we suggested otherwise and they sent a truck out to investigate.
At 8:00pm the truck checked out the line to our house (which is about 500m from the road) and the breakers on the line. All were good. When they checked the transformer on a pole just outside of our house the problem was found: the transformer was not working. It had gone boom. It had shuffled off its oil-soaked innards. The lightening had made it explode. Thus the exceptionally loud boom.
At midnight we had a new transformer and power flowing into our home again. The crews that fixed the problem were fast and neat.
The tally from the storm began to accumulate after we had power returned and we found that
- None of our (powered) telephones worked
- Our satellite connection to the Internet did not work
- Our router did not work
- My laptop power supply was toasted (and smelled funny)
The laptop was not on a UPS or surge protector (my bad) but Apple has put a new one in the mail for me. The phones were likewise not protected and we bought new phones the next day. The router and the satellite were both on UPS but got toasted–but they were connected by CAT-5 cable.
All in all it was not too bad. Nobody was hurt and everything should be back to normal in a week or so. My heart rate should have dropped to normal levels by then.
