The time that our apartment building got hit by lightning!
File this one under "morbid curiousity."
The hole! Previously, I thought that the lightning had hit either the metal railing on the stairs or the dryer vent, but this is actually the inside wall. Because I've got the comparable room on the other side of the unit, I know that there's an electrical socket right around that hole. Hmm. These are taken from the landing on the stairs between the second and third floor (we live on the second), so one can deduce that it hit the bedroom on the third floor, caught that unit on fire; the floor then collapsed into the second floor.
That's the view from the hole. Those rafters are also the floor of the third floor unit. That's a bedroom in the unit on the second floor, the unit that's on the other side of the wall in our dining room. If this was our apartment? That's my room. Yeah.
Obligatory debris photographs. Of course. About a hundred feet through those woods is a new strip mall. You have to love South Jersey.
So here's an incredible thing: when you walk into our apartment, while you can certainly smell the fact that the adjoining unit is burnt to a crisp (mesquite BBQ, it smells like mesquite BBQ), there's no perceptable water or fire damange. THANK GOD. However, what there is is a thin layer of soot over... well, basically everything. Like on my mother's bathroom counter. When she picked up the earrings and necklaces on it, there was a SHADOW. It's creepy and cool and just plain weird. I didn't even think the carpet was that dirty... until we picked up a rug and discovered a completely different color underneath. Oops?
Un. Fucking. Believable.
The hole! Previously, I thought that the lightning had hit either the metal railing on the stairs or the dryer vent, but this is actually the inside wall. Because I've got the comparable room on the other side of the unit, I know that there's an electrical socket right around that hole. Hmm. These are taken from the landing on the stairs between the second and third floor (we live on the second), so one can deduce that it hit the bedroom on the third floor, caught that unit on fire; the floor then collapsed into the second floor.
That's the view from the hole. Those rafters are also the floor of the third floor unit. That's a bedroom in the unit on the second floor, the unit that's on the other side of the wall in our dining room. If this was our apartment? That's my room. Yeah.
Obligatory debris photographs. Of course. About a hundred feet through those woods is a new strip mall. You have to love South Jersey.
So here's an incredible thing: when you walk into our apartment, while you can certainly smell the fact that the adjoining unit is burnt to a crisp (mesquite BBQ, it smells like mesquite BBQ), there's no perceptable water or fire damange. THANK GOD. However, what there is is a thin layer of soot over... well, basically everything. Like on my mother's bathroom counter. When she picked up the earrings and necklaces on it, there was a SHADOW. It's creepy and cool and just plain weird. I didn't even think the carpet was that dirty... until we picked up a rug and discovered a completely different color underneath. Oops?
Un. Fucking. Believable.