Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Lightning Strikes Digital ProTalk and David A. Ziser Photography

About 11:00a.m. yesterday morning LaDawn and I were visiting with a good friend who had just stopped by the studio unexpectedly. The winds were a howlin', the thunder was a boomin', and then CRAAACKKKK! -that last lightning strike was way too close for comfort. How close was it - well it severed the guy wire attached to the lightning rod completely off. We found it on the deck once we started inspecting the property.

Jen and Stacy were working on a few images in our production area and claimed an arc of sparks shot out of a power socket just missing them by inches. Sharon was long distance on the phone and she too luckily escaped without injury. Since there were no burn marks around the outlet, I deduced (a carry over from my Physics days) it must have been a plasma jet.

Anyway, they were fine, but some of the equipment was not. The computers were all OK, but the Router did not survive. After some testing , it was declared DOA and another is en-route from Netgear. Needless to say, all connections to the outside world were cut off.

Phone service still has not returned, traffic lights were not working, and sirens were blaring. That explains the late post. I ended up using a thumb-drive to transfer the blog images to my laptop, reconnected to the Internet via my handy dandy Verizon card and got posted about 3:00 p. m.

Today we are getting things back on line and should be back to normal in a day or two. Neither rain, nor shine, nor bolts of lightning will stop DigitalProTalk.com ;~)

5 comments:

  1. Whew! Lucky it only took out your router, and it is good that everything and everyone else is OK.

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  2. Glad everyone is OK - those storms were very bad. Just about 80 miles east of you (my house in Chillicothe) the tornado sirens had us heading for cover every few minutes so the computers were off and disconnected.

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  3. Like this others said, good to know all you lost was a router. I lost the same in a storm a while back. Since I didn't have a laptop wireless card though, I was w/out network access to the internet so I had to hardwire a workstation temporarily. Now, my router is also on a UPS with surge protection.

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  4. Glad everyone is OK. Maybe God doesn't want you shooting RAW?

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  5. Hi David, I've been a regular reader of your blog and am a part time photographer. Living in the Chicago area we see our share of storms. I also own a company that focuses on disaster recovery and business continuity for small business. Like the others, first and foremost it's great to see that no one was injured. Very scary. From a small business perspective the statistics are staggering. While the numbers vary slightly, 43% of small businesses that experience a disaster never reopen. 51% will close within 2 years. For a lot of small business owners this is their life. As a fellow photographer I know what the impact would be for those who have their own business and would go through something like that and I’d be happy to offer some free advice to anyone interested on ways they can prepare for when things like this happen. Feel free to contact me..

    Joe
    www.chicagophotographic.net

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