I was called to residence yesterday to do an inspection of damage for the insurance company. We recently had an ice storm that took down power lines. This customer was out for 4 days. When his power came back on, he had multiple items burnt up. Micro, stove, cordless phone, dishwasher, tv, vcr, dvd player, computer surge protector, flourescent lights to name a few. The major items didn't get affected because he had them unplugged and plugged into a generator.

The odd thing about this is everthing affected was on the same phase in his (120/240) panel. Now I have seen this before on a phase to neutral short on an overhead service. But his service is all underground from the transformer pole to his house. The cause of the outage was a primary line broke a mile down the road.

Can anybody give me an explanation for this?