Recently, my house was hit by lightning. To be more precise, this occurred February 10 and this fact (or bad luck or divine punishment or whatever...) will remain in my memory
for awhile. Let me explain:

The Shock

My MSN and Gtalk friends (especially for my contacts who ldon’t ive in Brazil) always thought funny when I warned them that a storm was approaching and that perhaps it would be necessary to turn off the computer. I really agree that this conversation seems to be a paranoid talk. This “almost paranoid” state of mind (I will not admit that I am paranoid, then again have you ever seen a paranoid person saying “indeed I am paranoid”?) has been useful in other occasions.

However, at that afternoon I was caught completely unprepared: there were no signs that a storm was approaching, the sky was only partly cloudy and I actually could hear some thunders but those were coming from far away. I shut down the computer and in that exact moment my sister pressed the bell of my house. The second after she came in, a flash followed by a sharp sound of an explosion made my house shake.

The problem is that I had not disconnected the computer from the power grid and not the external modem and after the “shock”, I completely forgot about it. Me and my sister talked for 10 minutes until ... BUM! Another hit another house on my block. Only after the second that I remembered that it had disconnected the wires from my computer and other electronics at home.

Of course, after the second lightning I knew that my computer had suffered some damage. Even so I went to my room to disconnect the computer and then all electronic things in my house connected from the electric network. And believe me! Maybe this has been my salvation.

On the same afternoon another two lightnings hit my neighborhood. Yes, 4 on the same day! On the same afternoon! Do you know what are the chances of that happen?

To be honest I didn’t know until 3 or 4 days after a news article in Folha de São Paulo (the most important newspaper in Brazil) on this subject. Brazil is the country in which is registered the higher incidence of lightning in the world. Per year, about 100 million rays reach the Brazilian territory. there is still no consensus on the high incidence of lightning in Brazil.

In Sao Paulo state, in which I live, the odds of someone being struck by lightning are 1 in 2 million (just a detail: the chances of you win a lottery is 1 in 50 million). In some areas of my state the lightning incidence (measured by volume per year) reach 12 per square kilometer.

But enough of “negativity” because in some ways being unable to access the internet for 5 weeks has brought benefits to me.

PS: a few years here I noticed that some climate changes were reaching the region where I live. The most notable example was the tornado that hit my city causing the death of a person. To be honest I did not find reliable data on the internet on the average incidence of lightning in other countries or continents. But I can guarantee one thing: the amount of lightning that hit my neighborhood was not normal, it was a climatic anomaly.