Err - I left out an important detail that you may have already guessed:
mounted directly over the table, thus right above our heads
Yep…the ZOT/BAM twice on my boat in a severe thunderstorm, where the ZOT is that huge electrical ZAP that you hear milliseconds before the clap of HUGE ass very CLOSE thunder. You get the ZOT, or ZWAP! when you are within about 20’ of the strike.
Six men on an open ski boat, in the Intercoastal waterway, making our way back to docks in Cape May, NJ…trying to get home before the thunderstorms hit. We were in the intercoastal waters behind the Wildwoods, and couldn’t leave the channel and head for some other docks, because it was dead low tide. Our only option was to cruise back to the marina. If we left the channel for someone else’s dock, it would have meant we were grounded.
Grown men cried. Four of them. I couldn’t see where I was headed because the rain hurt that bad.
ZWAP/BOOM…twice. Adult men cried, hid under the dash board and threatened to kill me. At the time, they could not be reasoned with. They wanted me to leave the channel.
1990ish, just a few miles down the road from Macomb, Illinois. I was a passenger in a car being driven home after a cut-short day in the park. We’re trying to make our way home through torrential rain and lightning when a bright flash suddenly blinds us. I hear a little “piff” and then a deafening CRACK, and then shortly thereafter we’re showered with mud and debris. Lightning apperenlty struck the ground a few feet from us and threw up some mud or something. Weird.
I was about 13 and helping a friend babysit her younger brother and sister while our parents were at a meeting. We’re sitting in the dark watching TV while a storm is going on. All of a sudden we notice the hair all over our bodies standing on end. It’s one of those feelings that’s hard to imagine, but you know it when it happens. We were terrified and ran out of the house. We thought the house would catch fire, although actually nothing did. We ran next door to the neighbors’ house in the pouring rain. It turned out lightning had hit the flagpole in front of the house; the flagpole was connected to the porch by a chain. I’d say we were maybe 20 ft. from the flagpole.
I love storms, especially the violent ones we get here in the midwest. The more lightning and rolling thunder the better. Spectacular.
But the one time it came too close was when lightning struck the roof of my mom’s house. I was sitting in the living room about 40’ away. The bolt of electricity came down through the fan vent in the ceiling above the stove and slammed through the metal (gas) range.
It was…spectacular: sparks everywhere, nearly deafening and this weird blue retinal afterglow. Not to mention the overwhelming stench of ozone.
That was close enough for me. No golf courses for this girl.
Veb
Maybe 5 years ago, I was home alone on a terrible stormy day. I was watching the lightning through the dining room window, because I love thunderstorms. The clouds were very dark with a sort of reddish tinge to them - those clouds usually mean a really wild thunderstorm, in my experience, so I was expecting a good show. The rain was coming down so hard that the street out front was a river, and the rumbles of thunder sounded very close and very loud. Then, as I was watching the street, I was suddenly blinded by the brightest light I’ve ever seen, as a bolt of lightning hit the middle of the street, maybe 15 feet away. Why it didn’t choose to hit one of the dozens of nearby trees instead is a mystery to me… The BOOM that went along with it knocked me backwards onto my butt and left my ears ringing. It was like a bomb had gone off in the front yard!
And more recently, about a year ago, I was watching another storm (no, didn’t learn my lesson at all :D), this time on the back balcony of my apartment. Lightning hit the telephone/electrical pole 20 feet away, and the transformer exploded in a fantastic shower of white sparks. The transformer caught on fire, and the smell of the smoke mixed with the ozone from the lightning was really strong. The firemen showed up soon after to put it out, and all the neighbors were on their balconies by then to watch the excitement. Not much else to do, really, because the power was out for a while after that.
Good times, good times.
My dad told me a while ago about one time when he was milking his cows with a portable pump, and when he finished with one cow, it wandered out of the milking shed, and got hit by lightning right on the ear, killing it.
Well, this is timely. I personally have never had any close strike.
But just this week a guy that works on the same floor as I was actually hit. Not actually “co-workers,” although it is the same company.
His service was this evening.
First close one that I remember happened sometime around late May to early June 1984, in Neenah, Wisconsin. I remember because I was reading a magazine article about the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Anyhow, I don’t actually remember the storm except for the one lightning strike. There was a FLASH-BOOOM and the power in the house immediately went out. I don’t recall how long it stayed out either. But what I remember is the next day I walked over to the neighbor’s yard. The neighborhood phone & power lines ran through our backyard. The transformer on the neighbor’s pole was blackened and there was a yellow burn mark on the ground underneath it where the lightning had hit the ground, probably about thirty feet from our house.
A second even closer one happened while driving on Butterfield Road in the western 'burbs of Chicago, on a summer afternoon in the mid '90s. My family was driving back to Wheaton from La Grange where we were visiting my mom’s sister. The weather was fairly clear in La Grange, but we drove into a storm as we drove past the Oak Brook shopping mall. It was a torrential, can’t see a thing type with lots of thunder and lightning. Suddenly there’s a FLASH-BOOOM, so loud I instinctively dive to the floor of the car (no, I wasn’t driving, I was in the back seat, thankfully my dad didn’t flinch, and neither did any cars near us!). We didn’t see the bolt, but it must have hit one of the metal streetlamp poles on the side of the road. About a mile down the road later we drove out of the storm. It never rained a drop back at the house in Wheaton.
I also remember quite a few frantic bike rides home from the city pool trying to beat sudden summer storms…never got stuck outside in anything really scary though.
In the summer of 1957, I was ten. I had a room on the ground floor, with windows on three sides, and I woke up in the middle of the night. Lightning and thunder going on all around, and rain coming down like the shower on hard all over. High winds, very big thunderstorm.
Great! I love thunderstorms. I sit up in bed, and press my nose to the window.
SizzzleZot-WHAM!
The seventy or so year old oak tree twenty feet from my window takes one of those multiple shimmer heavy duty lightning strikes, and freakin’ explodes right before my eyes! White light bright as daylight fills the world, and glowing orange chunks of bark/shrapnel spray out all over, including into the window I am leaning into. The sound was as loud a thing as I had ever heard.
Truly awe inspiring. The next day, I went out and checked, and the bark on the entire side of the tree facing the house was gone, from ground level to the top of the main trunk, (which had broken off in some previous storm) and every square inch of exposed wood was black. I never saw any fire, aside from the orange glow of the flying bark. I have seen other strikes, although not from that range, and never one quite so huge. I am sure my perception of the time it took was somewhat distorted. But it seemed to last a full second, at least, with the blowing up part coming noticeably after the bright light and sizzle.
I have had lightning strike closely behind me, as well, on two occasions. But you don’t have time to turn around and look, and in neither case was I able to tell just where it had struck. But it was loud, and very bright, even looking away. The smell is quite noticeable for minutes afterward.
I still love thunderstorms.
Tris
In New Hampshire, about 1999. There was a storm right on top of us. Lightening was hitting close numerous times. It must have hit the ground somewhere very close because standing on the porch I could feel the electric pulse through my feet.
A few minutes after that it hit a house not a 100 yards down the road. Burnt to the ground. :eek:
Two close calls:
- I was in geology field camp in north-central Oregon. On a rare day off, a few of us decided to go on a “thunder egg hunt,” i.e., looking for geodes in volcanic ash. The place we went to had a small shack where you could buy geodes already excavated by the land owner, or else you could go on up the (wooded) hill to dig your own, which most of us did.
Around 3:30 pm the daily thunderstorm rolled in. One of the guys hoisted his hammer into the air and shouted, “I am Thor, god of thunder. Fear me!” Just then a bolt of lightening struck a tree about 100 feet upslope with a tremendous CRACK, and the top of the tree broke off. Needless to say we ran at top speed back to the shack, and laughed like crazy once the initial fear had passed.
- Coming back from Mexico, our plane was forced to fly through thunderstorms over the gulf. Turbulence is bad enough for me, but at one point I turned to speak to my sister just in time to see a bolt flash right beyond the wing tip. I sat there with my mouth hanging open and my eyes completely bugged out, according to my sister. Normally I like flying, but this is one time when I sat white-knuckled until we landed.
Funny thing, I was napping in a closet when the basketball hoop on the far end of the building got hit by lightening. I was a camp counselor at the time (age 16). The guys playing pick-up said it was pretty cool to have seen. The girls I shared a room with got a good laugh out of me waking up screaming my fool head off. Why was I in the closet? you ask. It was the darkest, quietest place me and my migraine could find. :rolleyes:
At age 11, my girl guide troop went camping, and we had these tents which were mounted on wooden platforms. It started raining really hard during the night, and the noise woke me up. I lay there for a bit, listening to the thunder and rain, until I realized it was getting really close. I smelled an “electric” stink, and then there was a really loud clap of thunder that woke everybody up and had most of the girls screaming bloody murder. I remember calmly asking the leader if lightning was supposed to smell, and seeing her go very white in the face. We looked around after the rain eased up, and found a scorched pit less than two feet away from the wooden platform our tent was on - and my head had been right near that wall of the tent. :eek:
My dad was in a building that got hit by lightning. He said that the bolt arced between two power outlets and passed a foot or two from his head. If that wasn’t enough, the building caught on fire, and he opened the door to be greeted by a fireman weilding an axe, ready to bust the door open. He was there on a weekend, when the place was supposed to be closed, so the fire-department didn’t think anyone was there.
I was watching a storm one night( this was a family affair back in NJ- we’d turn out the lights and look out the windows) when there was this tremendous FLASH! BANG!, followed by the power immediately going out. But it did not get dark out. Half the sky was lit by a tremendous orange glow. The lightning had hit a power transformer a block from our house, and it and the power line got knocked off the pole and was short-circuited to the street. A powerfull arc of power was vaporizing a hole in the street, and turning the night into day.
I have no idea why, but it took them almost half an hour to turn off the juice that was feeding the arc. In that time, the arc managed to vaporize a hole 3 feet in diameter in the street. Truly impressive, at least to me, that the arc was hot enough to vaporize that much rock and asphalt away.