Power surge through cable modem coax?

I worked at a startup founded by the child of a farming family, and my desk was in "the pig barn," an old barn that I can only assume was previously occupied by pigs. (More senior employees got to sit in "the old house," a farmhouse that the parents used to live in until they built a better house elsewhere on their land.) These guys were the cheapest of the cheap when it came to buying any equipment, so the whole office was run on unmanaged Netgear desktop switches. Whenever they needed to add a computer and didn't have a port open, they'd just added another switch. And connectivity between the old house and the pig barn had been accomplished by firing up a tractor, digging a trench, and burying a cat 5 cable. So of course, whenever a thunderstorm came by, the charge differential as it moved across the property would produce currents in the buried cable. Not infrequently, this manifested itself as a port on one of the switches exploding with a gout of flame and plastic. Naturally these switches were sitting on the dry wooden boards of the floor of the barn. When this happened they would just move the cable to a different port on whichever end blew up, or if that didn't work, pull another switch out of the supply closet. They had an amazing collection of burned and broken switches from years of doing this. It wasn't all bad. You could step outside and take a walk in the beautiful nature of the farm, and pick and eat figs right off the tree.