No Ordinary End to Spring

Today was no ordinary last day of spring. The old adage “when it rains it pours” was true today both literally and figuratively.  

I have been on the road for the past week speaking at a conference in San Antonio, Texas and then to a Tweetup Event at the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. We also took a day in there to visit some friends in DC and see many of the historic sites. I hope to blog more about these events soon, provided the power stays on. That will make more sense later.

I arrived home for Monday with a full list of things to do back in the office but I knew things were off to an odd start when the western sky at 6am was bright orange as the sun reflected off the dark storm clouds.

Between 6am and noon, 4 waves of storms came through our area dropping just over 3 inches of rain. During one of these storms at least 1, probably 2 of the parking lot light trees in the parking lot at Faith were struck by lightning. The lighting took out those 2 lighting trees, the photocell that controls all our exterior lighting, the power to the panel for all exterior lighting and the power to the RTU (roof top unit) that cools our primary datacenter – to name a few things.

As a result, we eventually lost most of our network services for about an hour and had to reset several things. We also had to replace several breakers and tomorrow we have to replace several relays that were fused. While all of this was going on our team was also trying to prepare for VBS (Vacation Bible School) which started tonight. By 4pm, most things were back to normal and we were able to get the scripts, lighting cues, sound cues, and graphics all programmed for VBS just in time for the power to go out again 5 minutes before we started.

Our team is great and we had everything sound and video wise restored with a minute to spare before we started – thanks to numerous backup systems.  

Here’s hoping that summer starts Tuesday with less excitement than spring ended.