Lightning does some weird stuff for sure. One strike I saw was near a pole that had a camera at the top. Where the Cat6 went into the conduit at the base of the pole, the wire looked like it had exploded from within. The insulation on the individual conductors had melted a bit as well.

Another strike took out 8 analog cameras that were on a common power supply. It seems to have struck about 100' from one of the cameras, went up that run and down the other 7 runs on the secondary side of the power supply, yet the power supply itself was alright - didn't even blow the fuse on the primary side. Same strike killed the main boards on 3 out of 4 gate operators, an M-net gateway, 6 TPS-6Ls, a CCTV switcher, etc...

Last year, a customer called me about one of his cameras having gone offline. I tried a remote reboot and it didn't work, so I rode out and when I got the house, there were all these pebbles on the driveway, which I didn't think much of. Turns out it was a strike, and the pebbles were from where the lightning hit the top of the house, where there's this high standalone cinder block wall - it blew apart the corner of that and the exploded block was all over the driveway. The camera actually was OK, and one Samsung TV was killed. A Pioneer AVR was hung up and needed a reboot. At his neighbors house, it took out 3 Crestron MC3s and the 232 ports on his projector and Lite Touch processor.

On Monday, at one of my only commercial jobs, a strike took out their modem, router and PoE power of an IP phone.

Yesterday, we swapped out 4 cable boxes at another house, all smoked by a strike, along with a small Samsung TV.

That stuff keeps me really busy during the summer.