Posted on 06/08/2011 3:35:34 PM PDT by Dacula
Heard that no one was hurt seriously down in Hattiesberg.
Wow...you don’t tend to get MASCAS experience as a cadet...
Since it seems like everyone is ok, I can post a snarky comment.
You know the USAF, we're always at the bleeding edge of things.
I won't say much about kay-dettes getting struck by lightning, but I can't deny having fantasies like that when the cluster hit the **** during an ORI.
Don't get me wrong, I love orficers, someone's got to sign for stuff, and you can eat them when rations get short.
/johnny
When I was in college in the late ‘70’s a lot of army ROTC units would meet at Shelby each spring for a giant “Orienteering” meet. Think of a race through the woods except you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you have to use a map and compass to find your way from one point to the next. As I recall Shelby was loaded with snakes, and when it storms there was usually lightning aplenty! Rarely stopped the competitions however. ROTC was never a fair weather pursuit.
Every storm has a first bolt. Lost a tv and the overhead lights to that some years ago...sky got a bit dark but nothing had happened yet so I was holding out for the news so I could see the weather...*boom!*.
Lightning didn’t get my stuff; mine got zapped by a DUCK.
Sitting at home one evening just after getting the kids to bed, and from out front of the house there came a brilliant blue-white flash that lit up the whole neighborhood, a BOOM that resounded like a canon shot, and then everything went black.
I snagged my MagLite, headed out to survey the scene, and found a still-smoking, stone-dead Mallard on the sidewalk. I trained my light on the 40K power lines overhead, and immediately found black scorch marks on two adjacent cables.
Ev’ry picture tells a story, don’t it?
We probably should have dressed out the duck, finished cooking it, and enjoyed the meal, because I ultimately had to replace the power supply and motherboard to get my computer back to normal. Power supply was blown, and some transient voltage got through it to one of the power feeds on the motherboard, which crippled it so I couldn’t run the CPU hard, anymore, without it just locking up.
I put a big whole house surge suppressor on my service panel, and keep good ones at all equipment. Cascaded surge protection is best. Big voltage transients are weird stuff, so I can’t be sure I’ll always be protected, but looked at as an insurance cost, it really wasn’t all that much.
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