My stepson is a premises technician for at&t in the Atlanta area. He recently responded to multiple outage reports. Lightning took down a pole and the high voltage power crossed with the telephone cable. The first pic is of the NID that he encountered at the first location. The second two are of the nearby cross-connect box serving the area. The fourth and fifth are of what is left of a pedestal, where the cover was literally blown across the street with little evidence that it ever existed. Yes, it used to be light green. Take a look:

WOW! So they will have to replace that entire crossbox? What a nightmare!

And the liquefied cable.

Had one many years ago when it did the same to a pedestal. Jumped from a down guy to the pedestal. Took out a mile or so of cable too, all buried. Pretty rare in buried plant, but it happens.

Ive seen it when it took out drop wire. Just vaporized the copper and the insulation was turned into hard plastic, where if you tapped against a hard surface, it was like an icicle and just shattered.

Powerful stuff. Oh, and don't talk on your landline during an electrical storm :-)

Amazing! Thanks for sharing.

I remember my Dad telling me something similar while he worked for a phone company in rural Montana. He had never seen lightning go through a buried cable like that for such a long distance. I suppose it was a penny or two to replace it all..

Is that a roll of BLUE WHITE on the door? :confused: :confused:

Looks violet to me, lol

And I can imagine a number of service calls to replace triple play TV boxes as I am sure the surge went through the NID protector.

I bet that cabinet had a nice smell when he opened it up.......LOL.

When I was in station repair they sent out to visit an old boomer lineman" just sit for ahile and let him tell you about the old days". Well he showed me all the pictures of the boomers all standing on x-arms and so on, well in the corner of the living room was what looked like a glass xmas tre, turned out it was a groud rod hit by ighting in sandy soil; the sand had crsytalized into glass looked just like a clear glass x-mas tree.

I like the "Lightning Speed Ready" in the 3rd photo....guess they weren't. :rolleyes:

Ha, ha, Jim. No, it is type G cross connect wire, 22 gauge, double jacket, white/violet. You already knew that!

It would be interesting to know if there were a bonding or grounding issue for that section of cable or ped.

...wow. I always try to stay indoors during a T-storm, but those photos reinforce the reasons why.

Joe

It wasn't actually lightning that hit the cable to directly cause this. It hit a newly-erected pole and started a sequence of events.

The lightning took down a 7,200 volt power line which crossed with an aerial telephone cable. I'm guessing that the support strand heated up enough to melt into the cable, causing the resulting failure. This cable count appears to have run back into the cross connect box in the 401-500 pair count of the distribution side.

What is even more interesting is how the damage carried over through the cross connects to the feeder cable count.

I sure hope no one was injured (or worse). Sure the cabling and other equipment can be fixed/replaced, but people not so much.

We are in the lightning captitol of the US here in North/West FL. I have seen all kinds of lightning damaged plant, but when I saw those pics and based on the series of events you described I suspected it was caused by the power and not the actual lightning itself. Even if the cable section is bonded properly and meets spec. If a power company neutral goes open or a hot leg gets crossed it will throw higher voltages on our sheild than we can withstand causing everything to melt down. I have seen it happen a few times, that's why it is so important to test the shield for high voltage before disconnecting. In this case it happened all at once and it was obivious, but sometimes it is more gradual in nature. We could be acting as part of the power company's nuetral if they have an undersized neutral or a high joint or open nuetral. Sometimes these events happen over time and are not as obvious. This can be deadly if you don't do you homework.