From Jan: My Nasty Experience with Lightning in Rhodesia

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Johannesburg is supposed to be a bad place for lightning. Last night we had some lightning which actually caused my PC screen to go dark the instant the lightning was there – I assume there was a powerful magnetic field. A neighbour of mine, from Eastern Europe said she jumped out of her chair when that lightning strike occurred. The lightning has apparently knocked out some eletrical equipment, possibly a substation and several neighbourhoods are without power. I told my Eastern European neighbour this story: In Rhodesia we had really bad lightning on the farm. The farm had lots of rocks, huge rocks, some of them bigger than a big room in your house. The rocks had a lot of iron content in them and they drew the lightning a lot. The lightning we had was very bad. It was really dangerous. I think lightning once even killed one of our cattle that stood next to a barbed wire fence when lightning hit the fence. My nastiest experience with lightning was that we had a big old house with 5 bedrooms. One rainy day I was in a room and I heard a very loud bang from lightning, but I also was sure I heard glass shattering. I went out the room and walked right through the house from room to room looking for a broken window. I was sure I heard glass shattering. I went to the kitchen and told my Mom but she had not seen anything there. The very last room I went to was my own bedroom. The telephone line entered our house in my bedroom and my bedroom was right at the end of the house. The lightning had struck the telephone line and it burned down and melted the telephone wire which was right next to my bed. Down the entire wall was this black/purple mark from the instant the lightning burned the telephone wire. And the glass which I had heard shattering was one of the windows in my bedroom. The window shattered from the sound of the blast in my room. I was so shocked by that event, that I moved to another bedroom that same day and never again slept in that bedroom!! ?? It was a good thing I was not in my room when that happened. We had a *LOT* of lightning on our farm. It was even worse than Johannesburg, and Johannesburg is supposed to be one of the worst places in the world for lightning. The most of the rocks on the farm had an orange tinge to them, and other Whites said this was from lightning strikes. I’m not sure if that’s true.

jlamprecht