MESTRE – «I’m a heavy sleeper and I hadn’t even heard the storm the other night. But that bang and that incredible glow made us wake up with a start, with our hearts in our mouths. I thought it was a bomb, that something had exploded… Then, hearing the rain, I realized it was lightning and I went back to bed. But I would never have thought that that bolt of lightning had “fallen” right on our heads…”.
It seemed like everything was going well, but instead it did some damage. The inhabitants of the condominium in via Mestrina 22 know something about it, the five-storey pink building in the pedestrian area on the corner with via Ca’ Savorgnan, on whose centralized TV antenna the immortalized lightning bolt struck with all its electric violence at 5.30 on Monday morning from a webcam positioned in Piazza XXVII Ottobre.
“I was woken up by that big bang and a sudden very bright light, so much so that I thought it was an explosion,” says Giorgio Naia, a resident of the condominium. The lightning had in fact struck the centralized antenna on the roof of the building, causing such a surge in voltage that it triggered all the circuit breakers in the apartments and shops on the ground floor (“we were closed on Monday, but today I found everything turned off, as if for a blackout” they said yesterday from the Pettenò pastry and chocolate shop), thus forcing a large part of the inhabitants to check the electrical panels and meters.
THE DAMAGES
«But this was the least of it – Naia continues – because the following morning, around 9, a neighbor called me to ask me if I could see something on TV, given that they were broadcasting the election results. But we couldn’t get any programs in my house either.” The power of the lightning had in fact “spared” the antenna on the roof, but not part of the control unit which then distributes the signal to the houses. Once the control unit was replaced, the other bitter surprise: several televisions were also electrocuted: «The internal signal receiver was gone so much so that, in order not to throw them away, we connected them to an external decoder, one of the digital ones terrestrial”. There are those who “lost” a couple of three televisions in their home due to Monday’s lightning strike. «Only the older models were saved. We’ll see if we can cover the damages with the condominium’s insurance” they conclude from via Mestrina.
