Zap!

Monday morning we were all having breakfast at the kitchen table during a relatively mild thunderstorm when lightning struck one of the big elms in our backyard. Yikes! Matt, Anna, and I all witnessed the strike, to the point of Matt and I seeing steam, smoke, and debris flying off of the tree. The light colored line in the above picture shows where the bark and strips of wood were torn off of the tree.

The good news is that everyone and everything living is safe. The tree is still standing and the arborist says we'll just need to wait a few weeks to see if the strike killed the tree or not.


The bad news was that many items connected to our phone cable got fried. After traveling down the length of the trunk of the tree, the electricity followed a root underground and proceeded to cross our cable/phone wire. (In the above picture you can see how the dirt and sod were blown off of the root by the power of the strike.) Bad news. It was a LONG week. We lost our phone and internet at 7:30 a.m. on Monday and didn't get our phone back until after noon on Thursday. We had three different Charter techs here, they replaced everything inside and outside the house that they could, and we were on the phone with Charter several times every day. We still need to replace the ethernet connection on our computer before everything (that we know of) is back to normal.

We know that we are extremely blessed to have survived a lightning strike like this with so little damage, but we certainly had our fair share of headaches to deal with this week.

After the storm was mostly done, the girls got to go run in the puddles. Childhood fun :)


Later in the day, the girls created a lightning/tree game in which one of them was the tree and the other got to be the lightning and zap the tree :)