Hit by lightning

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ALL THE HYPE around the millennium bug had passed several weeks ago so it looked like I wasn't going to have any computer problems. I had moved house just before the new year into a small rental under the main level of a house where friends were renting.

Heavy rain was falling outside and a strong wind was blowing, but there was no thunder, so I made the assumption this wasn't a thunderstorm, so it was a perfect time to reinstall Windows on my PC to start working on what would later become my very first travel blog (though it would start as a musical blog).

I loaded Windows 2000 being a fan of the Windows NT operating system as opposed to the much less stable Windows 98. I loaded it from the CD drive and the computer ran through the DOS part of the installation process.

Eventually the operating system was loaded and I was ready to go through the windows to customise and localise it. The GUI loaded and the mouse pointer appeared with the first dialog box. I clicked on "Yes" and at that very instant the house was hit by a huge bolt of lightning, hitting the metal guttering on one of the corners right on the light bulb holder pictured above. The bolt of lighting went through the upstairs flat narrowly missing three people sitting in the lounge.

The electricity went through all the electrical cables vaporising all the negative wires (the positive and earth wires were not affected for some reason - we had just had an electrician out here about a week ago to fix an earth leakage issue and will come back tomorrow with his work cut out for him).

From where I was it sounded like a large metal garage door closing but much louder. The charge came through my computer as I was pressing the mouse and I found myself being flung back on my wheeled seat a couple of metres across the floor. It was a strong shock leaving two fingers on my right hand and also my right heel numb for a couple of days but otherwise no damage.

A couple of plugs came out of the wall as well and a light bulb in the hall exploded. Over the next day we cleaned up the broken glass but surprisingly there was little other damage apart from my computer which had the CPU and motherboard fried. The strong burnt metallic smell gradually eased over the coming days, especially after the electrician had cleared out all the old cable and rewired the house. Fortunately the landlord was insured to cover this.

Fortunately I had a spare motherboard and CPU, so in a few days I decided to put them in the computer. I wasn't sure on the state of the hard drive and RAM, but didn't have any spares, so I put them into the new motherboard and connected everything up. I turned the computer on and amazingly it booted up and automatically continued with the Windows installation right where it had left off. The mouse I had been using had fried as well (the metal contacts in the left click had fused together) and I didn't have a spare mouse, so quickly set up the keyboard shortcuts and finished setting up Windows. It ran perfectly fine (minus the mouse until I got a replacement).

The lightning strike had been the only one during the entire storm. The rain had stopped falling almost immediately after the strike, suggesting it was one of the very powerful strikes which start at the top of the cloud and works it way around the side of the cloud to reach the ground - one of the particularly nasty ones. The strikes that occur in the middle of the storm come out of the bottom of the cloud and are generally less powerful.