The induced EMF in my long cables like cat-5 throughout the house and my outdoor observatory also takes out motherboards, DSL interfaces and ethernet adapters each time. These days when I hear thunder I start unplugging devices.
Not much more evidence to go on, so it's largely superstition, but as a result I do generally try to keep my whole AV setup - game console, TV, AV receiver, etc. - plugged into a single power strip now.
I also now have a cat who is exceptionally nervous whenever he hears thunder. My wife and son were home at the time and... yes, the sound of a lightning strike at point blank is not just loud, it's.. like a crack in the world.
I'm not regularly around explosions and such so I've never experienced anything like that before or since.
Lightning is a powerful event and even if you're not that close to it, it can appear overwhelming and make you think you were much closer than you were. People who have experienced this talk a lot about what it looked like.
Everyone I know who has truly been close to a lightning strike unfailingly mention the sound above all else.
I was lucky to be in a car. A while back the same thing happened to someone walking over the top of a transformer causing very serious injuries.
I’m always kind of creeped out around iron grilles now.
When the lightning struck the thunder felt instant. It was however clear from the admittedly blinding flash that it was still a ways off. Probably some hundred meters.
But as you said, the sound. In a car, in a torrent of rain, it was the loudest and sharpest sound I believe I have ever heard. By the sound of it I could have sworn it was inside the car as couldn't tell it had been muffled at all by either the torrent of rain, or the bodywork and careful sound dampening in any modern car.
There had been lightning all around us for a while, but we barely heard the thunder of those strikes through the thunderous murmur of the sky falling down on us. The difference was truly astonishing!
That being said, if you’re close—really close—the sound does change. Lightning used to regularly strike a pair of trees just outside my bedroom window when I was growing up, since it was the top of a hill, and the trees were the tallest thing around, by far. Were my window open, I could reach out and touch the taller of the two trees.
The sound is so loud and so abrupt that I’m not really sure how to describe it. It’s instantaneous—over before you realize that there was a sound. It’s not a steady, drawn-out rumble like you might expect. In addition to the overwhelming, deafening crack, sometimes I would hear what sounded like a scream or a whistle—but that was almost certainly just a sensory artifact and not a real noise. Other people in the house would describe different artifacts.
I probably make it sound scary, but I always looked forward to thunderstorms as a kid, and each time I’d hope the storm would get close enough to strike those trees. It was absolutely amazing to watch—and, being a child with no sense of danger, I’d sit right by the window.
Maybe it was my imagination but it was so distinct that I wonder if it was the sound of discharge from nearby objects, or … something.
do you have a blog somewhere, or more writing somewhere?
It was like sensory overload, I remember hearing something, but not aware what and I found myself sort of crouched on the ground covered in tinyn (harmless) cuts and the tree bark that hit me.
I remember being aware of noise, but not a specific noise other than a sort of echo of it....and just knowing that a very loud noise had occurred.
Um, I don't know how often this happens but any chance of that damaging your hearing? Because I wouldn't know of any sound I'd even describe like that.
The part about it frying motherboards in your house makes me wonder how the cell tower copes with it. I assume it has a lightning rod but so close to that rod as the tower's equipment is, compared to how close your house is, it must fry everything on the tower? Do they come and replace all electronics on it every time?
> 13. This is just conservation of energy. The initial potential energy was mass times height times gravity. Divide by the 1/20th second that it "rings" out the pressure waves (the sound), and that is acoustic power. Divide by surface area of the toilet bowl lid to get energy flux.