Well, I can officially declare that I am paranoid about storms now, having been in a house that suffered a direct hit a few years ago.
6AM, pitch dark, and I wake up - decide, "Oh, just thunder..." and turn over to go to sleep again. Five or so minutes later - jsut as I'm dozing off again, and there's the phenomenally loud reverberating *CRACK* accompanied by all the lights flashing (even though they were turned off), and a seperate loud bang from the hallway, and innumerable snaps of disintegrating IC's and such through the house. Casualty list: Er...pretty much everything electrical apart from the TV (unplugged), boiler (pre-transistor era), a few lightbulbs, and the water heater. We reckon the damage came to somewhere around £5000. And natrually, the insurance company managed to get out of paying up by claiming it was "an act of god"...oh how many times I've heard that.
We live out in the country, and blackouts are relatively common. We don't think anything of the power seemingly without reason disappearing for an hour or so totally randomly, though it's been annoyingly reliably of late. Worst we've had I think was winter 1996 (or possibly 7) when the snow took the lines down, and we were without power for approximately 14 days. Unfortunately, this was well before I was seriously into the flashlight thing!
Craig can probably produce more light than all of the lights at Safeco field!
