*SMITE!* "Can you hear me now? Didn't think so."
So you might have noticed the local weather was pretty nasty yesterday. Browns Summit was said to have gotten 4 inches of rain in an hour. Lots of thunder, lots of lightning, the whole nine yards. Sara and I made it home last night about 6:30pm wet and hungry. When I got in the door I noticed an unusual smell, but since I was carrying dinner the odd smell was quickly overwelmed by chicken. (Chicken makes everything better.) The smell wandered away from the front of my mind even before the first piece of Churches chicken hit my lips.
Later that evening...
We're watching CSI and I am brewing my tea. (The process takes three hours.) Our cordless phone chirps that its battery is low. This is odd for several reasons, first the phone has a couple of days of standby charge, and second it was sitting on its cradle. These thoughts wandered away looking for something to connect to.
Connection established.
I saw the cordless phone's power supply. Ok, to be fair I saw about half of the cordless phone's power supply. It took about twenty minutes to find the other half (fifteen feet away). The phone line (part of it) was lying in the floor pointing away from the phone. It was burned, melted, and otherwise destroyed beyond repair. There is about a foot and a half of phone line that I haven't found yet. The table under the phone cradle is scorched to the tune of about five inches wide.
It was a this point that we stopped the world and made a systematic check of everything plugged in to anything. Appart from the GFI in the bathroom being tripped the lightning strike was kept out of the electrical system by the cordless phone's power supply which made the ultimate sacrifice in the process.
The second phone, a corded one appeared to be intact. We traced the cord which appears to be undamaged to the wall socket, which had severed its relationship with the wall entirely.
Ok, so I've got smoked phone lines all through the house. I will be replacing at least one phone and all of the inside wiring. It could have been a great deal worse considering the damage.
This morning, I walked outside to the junction box. It was open. This is odd as these boxes are actually screwed shut. The screw was still there. The door had been blown open. These junction boxes have basically two sides, a customer side and a phone company side. The phone company side of the box had been blown out through the customer side of the box. I can't wait to have this conversation with the phone company. They will probably tell me that anything on my side of the box is my responsibility, regardless of how it got there.
My only real concern now is wether or not to involve my homeowner's insurance in this. On the one hand I pay insurance to pay for things like this. But if things like this happen, I have to pay more on my insurance. Guido the insurance guy is a hard man to please.
