True story: I worked in Juarez 30+ years ago. We had two buildings across the street from one another and wanted to connect them via LocalTalk using those little boxes that plugged into the AppleTalk port of a Mac (and printers). The boxes were daisy-chained with flat phone wire cables and RJ11 connectors. In order to get the two buildings connected, our maintenance crew dug up the street, placed PVC pipes across, and pushed phone wire through. No problem, right?
Well, I was called back to the facility one evening when a cat apparently bridged the terminals of a transformer outside the building and vanished in a puff of smoke. The power cable from the city's electric pole dropped to the ground and sent a strong jolt through the ground which then reached to either end of the phone line under the street. The ends of that cable were connected to a Mac on one side and a laser printer on the other side. Both LocalTalk boxes smoked--literally; I found exploded transistors(?) inside and these two boxes were non-functional. As well, the AppleTalk ports on the two devices were fried. As the Mac had two such ports, I just swapped in a new LocalTalk box and connected it to the other port. One the other side, the printer's AppleTalk board was fried but the company (TI) sent me a new one gratis. No damage occurred to any other devices on the daisy-chain.
I'll note the phone wire that bridged the street (underground) survived the surge and, once the new LocalTalk board/boxes were put into place, we was a stain on ere back up and running. Yes; the maintenance crew had neglected to include any safety grounding/isolation/whatever to the original setup but added it after the incident.
BTW: I still remember the "shadow" of the cat that remained on the wall of the building adjacent to the transformer.