The entire neighborhood was awoken last week by a deafening sound. About one in the morning there was a loud boom that basically shook the house. We awoke to find that the power was out and my husband grabbed the flashlight and headed downstairs to see what had happened. When he looked outside he saw many of our neighbors standing outside as well and everyone looked just as confused as we did. If you block server we can see the glow of some sort of a fire and hoped that everyone was okay. Apparently one of the light poles have been struck by lightning and the transformer had exploded. We were experiencing thunderstorms at the time but didn’t feel they were bad enough to cause such havoc. My husband immediately went in and turned off the power that went to many of the appliances including the HVAC system. He didn’t want a power surge to damage them once the repairs were made to the line, Many people don’t realize that this needs to be done to prevent issues and it is important to remember that your appliances can’t take a sudden jolt of electricity. Many of them installed with ground faults that prevent is from being a problem but to be on the safe side you are always better to turn them off or cut the power to them while waiting for the electricity to come back on. We ended up being without power for almost 24 hours and thankfully the weather conditions weren’t too hot or too cold. It was only the middle of May so we weren’t dependent upon our HVAC system to keep us comfortable anyway.