THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 15, 1994 TAG: 9407150537
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
Thunderstorms have not always brought rain this summer, but unusually large numbers of lightning strikes have brought business to local electrical equipment repair shops and claims to insurance companies.
TV sets, garage-door openers, cordless phones, refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners, computers - if it's electric, lightning strikes have been zapping it, as residents have neglected to unplug appliances during recent storms.
For the two-thirds of Virginia covered by Virginia Power, including Hampton Roads, there have been almost twice as many lightning flashes this year as last, said Bob Greer, senior meteorologist for the electric utility.
On some days in Virginia and northern North Carolina, Greer said, it's common to record 40,000 to 60,000 strikes in a 24-hour period.
Virginia Power is a customer of the nation's only lightning-counting firm, GeoMet Data Services Inc., in Tucson, Ariz. Lynne Shumaker, GeoMet products manager, said her company, through its National Lightning Detection Network, counts about three-fourths of all lightning flashes from clouds to ground. In the continental United States, she said, GeoMet counted 7,892,664 flashes during the first half of 1993, compared with 9,979,973 during the same period this year - an increase of more than 2 million.
Dennis Diehl, property claims district manager for USAA Property and Casualty Insurance, said claims for a six-state area including Virginia are up 25 percent in
July because of lightning strikes.
Diehl has no trouble believing lightning has been striking.
On Wednesday at his Chesapeake home, lightning struck an 80-foot pine in his yard. He said a neighbor told him, ``It made that tree look like a candle; the top of the tree was a big orange ball.''
The blast shot down the tree and knocked bark into a pool 50 feet away, Diehl said, but a TV cable line buried five feet from the tree wasn't affected.
Factory TV Service Co. in Norfolk has six trucks on the road and 10 repairmen in the office and usually provides same-day service.
This summer, however, the service has fallen as far as seven days behind on repairs because of lightning strikes, said Eric Tebault, a technician. ``We had about 150 in less than a week,'' he said. ``It just killed us.''
Rick Eley of Chesapeake, owner of ABC Cordless Repair, says his business has doubled after recent thunderstorms. He said he was fixing about two dozen cordless phones a week, twice as many as usual.
David Fitzgerald said he received 12 to 15 lightning claims at his one-person State Farm Insurance office in Chesapeake last week. Normally this time of year, he said, he'd have none. Most of the claims were for TV sets and air conditioners.
Virginia Power spokesman Junius H. Williams Jr. said electrical items should be unplugged during electrical storms. And it is unwise to talk on the phone during a thunderstorm, he added.
In the Army in the early '70s, he was in a room with a general who was speaking on the phone when lightning hit the building and knocked the receiver from the general's hand. ``He hollered a number of things,'' Williams said, but a medical checkup showed no injuries.
Henry Mitchell, a Bell Atlantic spokesman, recommended unplugging the phone wire to computer modems during storms because a power surge can come through the phone line, even when the computer is unplugged. Or surge protectors are available that protect against power surges through both the phone line and the outlet.
Mitchell also recommended taking cordless phones out of AC sockets during storms.
Dana Coltrin, technical operations manager for Cox Cable in Hampton Roads, said to be especially safe, TV viewers, after unplugging their sets, can unscrew the cable outlet. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
JOHN CASERTA/Staff
WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES
SOURCE: ABC Cordless Repair, Factory TV Service Co., Virginia Power
[For complete graphic information, please see microfilm]
by CNB