After a week of unusual warm weather and a beautiful, warm sunny Sunday, thunder was heard over town from around 17:00.
A few lightning flashes were seen and the colour of the sky, as the sun set through a haze, was magical.
Then an experience of note was had by all residents, as a severe electrical storm started to erupt. There were lightning strikes all over town, visible from all directions. Very loud 'cracks' were heard, which caused many pets to be scared and some residents wanting to crawl under their beds!
The storm lasted just over 30 minutes, but left a wake of struck Telkom lines, modems, television sets and other electrical devices.
As storms like these are not common in the Southern Cape, residents were divided in their response! The people who have moved down from Gauteng, and are used to thunderstorms, watched the spectacle with nostalgia, while others were quite frightened.
Lightning and how it works
Lightning is, simply put, a giant spark of electricity. Even matter that is not electrically charged is made up of components which are both positively and negatively charged.
For some reason, these charges will separate in a storm cloud, resulting in different regions of the cloud having different electrical charges. Electrons (which have negative charge) build up on the bottom surface while protons (having positive charge) are at the top.
The negative charges on the bottom of the cloud can pull on the positive charges in the ground and repel the negative ones. The result is that the ground surface becomes positively charged also.
As the charges build up more and more, the situation eventually becomes very unfavourable and one of two things can happen.
Either the electrons in the cloud will suddenly jump toward the protons at the top of the cloud (known as 'sheet lightning') or the electrons will find their way to the ground. The electrons flowing to the ground are so energetic, that they excite the air which causes it to glow. That is what we see as lightning.
Also, not every strike of lightning hits the ground. Often there are lightning strikes between clouds or between one part of a cloud to another. Sometimes lightning can start from the ground -- these strikes appear to have the branches pointing upward instead of downward but they are very rare and usually occur from tall buildings.
If you have a stream of weakly charged particles moving through the air, sometimes the particles will split from each other trying to find the path of least resistance through the air.
When this happens, branches will form and this is what people call branch or forked lightning. The bright glow from lightning is caused by the immense currents (can be over 200,000 amps) super heating the air it is travelling along to 3 ½ times hotter than the surface of the sun.
This Telkom box in Montagu Street was hit by the lightning.
Remnants of a Telkom ADSL line after it was hit.
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