A couple of years ago, a lightning bolt struck our neighbors grand oak tree and killed it. The massive crack, flash of white light and static electricity in the air was incredible. Our house is about 30 yards from the tree. We all thanked our lucky stars that the lightning strike did not hit any of the houses. However we quickly found out that lightning causes electro-static discharge (like a kind of EMP) and spreads charge through the air and ground in quite a large radius. This surge is carried by any good conductor which in our case was all our coaxial, CAT 5e ethernet, HDMI and electric cables. As a result we lost our modem, outside projector, two flat screen TV's, three mac mini media servers, network switch, alarm system, a mac air, toaster, fridge freezer (compressor), AC compressor and many other smaller things. The crazy thing was that some things did not fail immediately but went days or sometimes weeks later or became unpredictable. It was not only the cost, but the inconvenience of doing without and replacing everything.
