Lightning Strikes

This Sunday was spent unexpectedly working at one of our main clients premises in the Trossachs. Late Friday afternoon various parts of their premises was struck by five strikes of lightning resulting in loss of power.

Just as work finished on Friday having received a telephone call from site, I managed to determine by phone that the loss of power was external to our clients site and the next 24 hours, saw the electrical power company install new transformers and cables throughout the Trossachs to restore power to various areas of the Trossachs.

Unfortunately power being restored on Saturday only brought to attention a multitude of other problems. There was no live telephone lines on isdn, analogue or broadband lines - the internal nortel telephone exchange system was fried, various parts of the security alarm system were affected and alarms were going off everywhere, cctv cameras were down and the internal computer server and network was all over the place - what a mess.

Thankfully during Sunday the alarm and cctv problems were on their way to being rectified and are now back up running. The computer system was 90% back to normal by end of day Sunday, but there was no way BT engineers were going to get out their bed on The Sabbath Day, meaning BT would not start investigating the dead lines until the start of the week.

The thing is, these thunderstorms must have been isolated to a very small area, as 25 miles away in Stirling and even only 10 miles away from our clients site, there was not a hint or any indication of what was happening over our clients site.