Mood:
accident proneTopic: The Weather
'St Elmo's Fire'
I lived for 4 years in a little North East Scotland coastal village called Portknockie . A few years back on a 'braw brecht moonlicht nicht' I returned to the little cottage on Cliff Terrace with my two good lady friends at the time Tanith and Kathy. We had been on a tour through Inverness ,Loch Ness across to FortWilliam and back to base via Aberlour along the river Spey.
Kathy had just opened the door and walked across the living room,reaching to a plug socket to insert her Cell -phone charger an 'instantaneous explosion' jolted our senses.. the lights went out..
It turned out we had been struck by a "St Elmo's Fire" The warning signs were there before. Giant hailstones and a freeky moonlight sky had decended into a frozen night well below zero.We were lucky. All my appliances had surge protection. Only damage was all the lights with transformers and a new fax machine!
St. Elmo's fire is an electrical weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge originating from a grounded object in anatmospheric electric field (such as those generated by thunderstorms or thunderstorms created by a volcanic explosion). Some of my fellow villagers were not so lucky. You find out the reason for proper earth bonding in a house during these events
St. Elmo's fire is named after St. Erasmus of Formiae (also called St. Elmo, the Italian name for St. Erasmus), the patron saint of sailors. The phenomenon sometimes appeared on ships at sea during thunderstorms and was regarded by sailors with religious awe for its glowing ball of light, accounting for the name.
Here's a little link to the Aberdeen newspaper article about the calamity ! A neighbour a few doors away had his boiler blown through the roof! worth a read this :
PS 'The ladies thought it was my electrical charm :-)'
It was just "Bloody Awesome ,Made me feel alive!"
lazy
Today Hang on till I open this hunters
15°C