Believe It or Not

I remember thunderstorms as a normal part of my childhood in Pennsylvania. Here in Talkeetna, dramatic summer storms pass through maybe once or twice a year at most. This one today was brief, but came with good old fashioned rumbles of thunder, claps of lightening and hard rain.

At about 5:15pm there was a huge flash and crack, then immediately afterward loud thunder...no time to count how far away it was. I was in the bakery with one worker. Brian was just leaving to go pick up Oliver from day care. Penny came running in from outside all shaking and pretty frightened.

An hour later I needed to fill a bucket of water for some painting clean up which we can now do from a spigot in the mechanical room. Brian told me to plug in the well pump. To make the rest of the story very short, there was a sort of "KA-POW!" with a big scary flash of light.

Best we can figure so far, yes, believe it or not, our well must have been struck by lightening.

Maybe someone can explain to me the whole "grounding" thing because as far as I know the well itself is a darn good ground and there are several rather expensive long copper rods in the ground for all the electrical everything on our property - not to mention that I thought the whole purpose of circuit breakers is to break off power to electrical devices before they explode. So much for the $500 well pump - hopefully it will be covered under warranty.

This is the moment at which my lovely mother would say, "If I do not laugh, I will cry."

We're thinking about purchasing a nice surge protector for our NEXT well pump. Just to be on the safe side. Go figure.