That house situation should have never happened if the house had the electrical circuit designed correctly. A house is suppose to have a heavy cable called a conductor cable that carries the voltage to a copper rod that is buried deep into the ground, so when lightning strikes the current passes from the house into the cables and into the rods and is then discharged through the ground all the while bypassing most of the voltage away from the circuit panel.
The ground rod and grounding wire won't always save you from lightning strikes. Indeed, lightning can travel through the ground, up the ground rod and into your breaker panel. The grounding system is meant to discharge static such as lightning, which comes in on the utility company neutral.
The utility neutral (proper term: grounded conductor) enters your panel after passing through your meter. It terminates in a neutral busbar bonded to the panel housing, unless you have a mobile home or you have the breaker panel in the middle of the house instead of an outside wall. In that case you'd have a disconnect outside and the bare ground wire would be connected there, and run to the ground rod. The neutral busbar has the bare copper grounding wire which then runs to the ground rod. So if lightning gets in another way, it's going to damage stuff before it gets to the grounding system.
In addition to that above system that is required by code in all states in America and has been required for quite some time, I've installed four other protection devices on my home because I live in a lightning prone area. The first line of defense is the meter surge protector, this is a surge protector that goes on right at the meter and keeps stuff from getting inside.
Those protectors are a one-time protection unless they've come up with a better one since I left the trade. The problem is, it may have done its job and you don't know it. Next time, it won't do a thing to discharge a lightning strike. I used to recommend them to customers when I installed their services. Some people accepted and some didn't. I guess they thought I was trying to make an extra buck.
Yes I have surge protection for appliances, why? because all appliances today are ran by electronics and not mechanical workings like they once did...
Those are designed for power surges such as when the power goes off then comes back on. It can do some damage but usually doesn't. What does more damage is when there's a brown-out for an extended period. That's a low voltage coming into the house, and it can destroy motors.
my computer is supported by a APC battery backup surge protection unit;
A wise move. Mine kept my computer and monitor running when lightning in the area knocked the power out only for a second, a couple of nights ago. I heard it click, and then a message popped up on the monitor to notify me.
Incidentally, several years ago a storm took our power out for twelve hours. I rigged up a generator to run my UPS, which ran my computer and a table lamp. When I went to bed something else was plugged into the UPS which drained the battery overnight because I didn't leave the generator running. The next morning I fired up the generator and turned on the computer. Just as it finished booting, it went off. I turned the computer on again and as it booted, it went down again. I thought the UPS was at fault but it wasn't. So I left it and waited for the utility power to come back on. When it did, the computer didn't work. It only took the two surges in trying to start it, to fry the power supply. I know it's not recommended to run a computer from a generator but I figured it would be okay through the UPS. Lesson: If your UPS battery goes flat, wait until it's fully charged before using the computer.