How do you protect yourself against lightning?

Tue Jul 20 02:23:01 2004 How do you protect yourself against lightning?
Posted by Bruce Garlock
Search Keys: Weather, Storms, Lightning, Acts of God, Backup, Recovery

The summer months in the northeast usually bring hot, humid weather, and the occasional afternoon thunderstorm. Recently, one of our buildings was hit by lightning, and we lost some equipment as a result. Slashdot had a recent post on this subject http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/11/0944235&tid=137&tid=4 and some of the answers were helpful, but I am wondering what pcunix.com users have to say about the subject. For example, one post suggested grounding is the key:

	I sell and install radio equipment that is installed
	on towers that range in height from 40 to 1400 feet.
	The taller ones are guarenteed to get direct hits from
	lightning ~every~ thunderstorm. The key to preventing
	damage is grounding. It doesn't matter what kind of
	lightning protection you have if your site grounding
	is not up to par. In a commercial building situation,
	the power entrance to the building must have adequate
	grounding. Isolation transformers are a great help as
	well. Lightning can also enter buildings via phone
	and network cables so make sure the telco demarc is
	properly grounded.
 

I also found a small slideshow that showed some "fried" equipment from the result of a lightning strike: http://www.austinwaldorf.org/tools/expose.html Although our hit was not that bad, mostly NICS, and some serial interface cards for our dot matrix printers, after seeing these pictures I am a bit more worried for the next time this happens. I really would like to know how to properly ground the telco demarc, since this could easily be an entry way into the network, since we have multiple T-1's connecting our buildings, and for our Internet access.

- Bruce Garlock

See Protecting from Lightning by BigDumbDinosaur.

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