Lightning is known as the third most serious natural disaster to humankind, and it is also a significant threat to buried pipeline safety. Quantitatively evaluating the lightning damage to buried pipelines remains a challenging task due to many factors: hard to obtain exact lightning parameters, the low occurrence probability, extremely short and super strong electromagnetic process. This paper provides a full-chain study of a super strong lightning strike to a buried refined oil pipeline, including an on-site survey, Lightning Location System (LLS) locating and detection, theoretical soil ionization model calculation, lab PE layer breakdown testing, and full-time domain numerical modeling. The on-site survey results show that the pipeline accompanying optical fiber is burned up to 80 m long, and the detailed LLS data show that the failure is caused by a super strong lightning strike with its peak current up to 308kA. We use a published ionization model to calculate the theoretical soil ionization radius and perform optical fiber external PE layer breakdown testing using artificial lightning pulses in lab. Our full-time domain lightning numerical modeling results show that the electric field intensity at the nearest point to the strike point on the optical fiber was about 140 kV/m, consistent with the critical electric field intensity used in theoretical ionization radius calculation. Our study contributes a valuable roadmap on how to quantitatively evaluate similar pipeline damages induced by cloud-to-ground lightning in the future.