Lightning is some nasty stuff. Luckily, it doesn’t have a very long lifespan. [BigClive] decided to tear down an 11KV lighting arrestor used in power distribution systems. The fiberglass core has silicone rubber water-shedding disks that make the unit look sort of floppy, but inside is some serious hardware.

To protect the circuit, metal oxide varistors shunt high voltage from a lightning strike to ground as you’d expect. The interesting part is how the device deals with failure. It would be a disaster if the device shorted the 11KV power line to ground for any length of time due to a fault. To prevent that problem, a resistor heats up when struck by lightning and triggers an explosive charge that disconnects the ground wire and releases a flag to indicate the failure.

[BigClive] triggered the charge in the video below. So if you like to see things explode in a bucket of water, you’ll enjoy the video.

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