Wife and I just noticed a flash of lightning outside and a couple seconds later heard thunder and our lights flickered like we were going to lose power. What is happening here?
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The approaching storm causes damage to the electrical network. This can be because lightning struck somewhere and damaged some of the equipment, because a tree fell over into power lines, or because the power lines themselves were downed by wind or flooding or the like. In any case, something disrupted the flow of power somewhere in the electrical network.
Fortunately, those networks are *redundant*: they have multiple paths for power to get from A to B throughout most of their area. When one part of the network fails, electrical switches in other parts of the network flip over to direct power through other parts of it. This doesn’t happen instantly, though, so there’s a brief delay before the rerouted power is available. This is visible to you as a brownout (drop in voltage, so called because of the dimming of incandescent light bulbs) or brief blackout (power failure) while the rerouting completes.
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