Ve ar bach!!

[AngelinaCatHub]

Well, after last Thursday's local lightning strike hitting on or very near our house, we have been offline for some time and online here and there for a bit.

First, in FL the lightning capital of the World, while walking to our cabin (House in repair) there is a big boom. Like, I mean not light then boom; I mean both!

So, we had one circuit breaker blown, one cable modem, the cable wire splitter, two routers, three network cards and a total loss to our main server. (We have five machines on our network as I am a computer consultant, webmaster, etc., etc., and broke anyway). So, it has taken a week of rebuilds and hardware we cannot afford, but at this moment we are about 90% right. (ALWAYS have an off-site backup).

That being said, who have we missed with discharges? It has been lengthy to go back and research, and all need their "Victory Dance".

Anyway, still plugging in there, and welcoming our newbies.

AngelinaCat, and 'Hub.

[LuciluS]

Hey Cat & Hub: I've been off for a couplet of days trying to finish up by BK papers. I've noticed this past month in AR the lightning has been horrific. It will light up the whole sky in white & then you see like dark gold streaks ging through the whiteness.

O Sorry to hear you lost so much computer equipment. Have Insurance? I know it has to be a separate addendum on your homeowners insurance co. However, we lucked on on the new home we bought in 10/04 in AR. We were in a larger city at JC Penney getting Dh fitted for a suit for a Cruise we were going on in Bam, Bam, and the lights went out. Omg, we had already been there over 2 1/2 hrs. as Dh is 6'6" tall, and a size 16 shoe. We were taking our first cruise and buying him something besides jeans, cutoffs, t-shirts LOL!
They called the power co. and they said it would take 3 hours to come back on. We asked the mgr. if he could use his walkie talkie & get the nice lady with her paid so we could get everything down & then she could input it the next day. She obliged.

As we are going over the AR River Bridge only way to get from the large city to our small town, Dh commented 'Gee, it hasn't even rained here yet. So we live on out about 2 -3 miles in a new subdivision. When hubby turned the corner & I saw all this stuff (shingles, soffette (sp?) guttering and even insulation I said to hubby O Lord, please let our little shih Tzu be okay. She was her happy go lucky self.

Called the fire dept. as house smelled of smoke. Found out it is a volunteer firedepartment. I kid you not, we had 2 firetrucks, an ambulance, 2 police cars & about 10 other firefighter's personal cars. Firefighter put on this heavy suit with a camera and crawled through our roofspace. He said there was 18 inches of insulation in the attic. All they found was hot nails. Smoke? Hard wired smoke detectors were all burned. Part of the guttering on the front office was burned. They say the lightning hit the garage door, blowing out the door opener, traveled down in the kitchen, blew that phone out & hit all 3 bdrooms & Office detectors & traveled out the office & blew the dormer. Blew out the modem, ethernet card Attached to MotherBoard, all phones were dead. Suggested we get an Electrician out the next morning - A Saturday - & he came out on that Sat. Too.

Equipment cost more than it did for they guy who put our guttering on to fix all the outside work. Well, got our insurance company to pay for the modem (which they really were not supposed to) & the phones & the new hard wired smoke detectors. We had a 4 yr. contract on the PC so they came out to the house and replaced the motherboard.

So know a tad bit about it on a much, much smaller scale than you and Hub. Sorry it hit the ole pocketbook so hard. But Hey! We Are Alive!!

Hugs

Luci

[justbroke]

'Hub... we are not too different. I know exactly what you mean on the lightning. I have about 9 servers (6 high-end servers), and just lost my Cisco 3620 Router this last week. i don't know if it was lightning, but I can't afford (for a couple of weeks at least) to replace the power supply (which is causing the trouble). Maybe we got hit too here in the other parts of Florida... but I hate losing equipment!

I have several APC UPS' with one of them a 3KVA unit that has $100K in equipment protection. I have about 4 other APC units and they are 1.5KVA each, and have $50K equipment protection warranties on them. Hope I never need to use them.

I wish you luck with your rebuild. If there's something interesting you need, let me know in a PM. I have a bunch of junk, and certainly plenty of patch cables, NEMA cords, and other junk like that laying around.

[JRScott]

Sorry to hear of you guys problems. I hope you can get things fixed up.

[kenshirley]

Yep, lighting can get costly unless you protect your equipment.
I have been into amatuer radio (ham) for many years and we have to really watch it, or pay the price.
Not too bad here but in SE AZ where we moved from we had many a close call with lightning over the years.
I had to sell off all my equipment when things got tight to pay bills back when but someday I will get back on the air when I can afford more radio equipment.
At least it was not a direct hit on the house!