Photos: 25th Anniversary of Lightning Striking My House
As I said five years ago, June 17 was the anniversary of lightning striking my house in North Carolina in 1987. Along with Hurricane Hugo hitting my house, it was one of a handful of important weather events during my childhood that helped solidify my interest in meteorology, which led to my attending UNCA for a meteorology degree, and by extension, my job here at AccuWeather and resulted in this blog entry that you read today.
Lightning Strike 1987: Blown out wall
For this important anniversary, I wanted to go beyond what I had done in the past to commemorate the date, so I remastered the original photos (rescanned them in and tweaked the color), dedicated a blog entry to my "newspaper" report from that day and have published it below (for the first time on AccuWeather.com) my complete account of the storm:
"I'll never forget that date of June 17, 1987, when lightning struck our Workshop (a building as large as our house, located behind it, under construction at the time) and traveled into our house through an extension cord. It wreaked havoc along the way, damaging everything it touched.
With a loud crack which partially deafened my father, who was in the Workshop at the time (trying to close the windows so rain wouldn't come in), the lightning hit the roof of the Workshop, which was not fully finished on the inside but the exterior was complete. My mother and I were inside the (other) house. I was shocked on a windowsill as I attempted to let her in from the porch (wisely I had just warned her to come in through the window, the storm was getting quite bad).
The lightning burned a hole in the roof (peeled back the tin actually, I have a picture of this somewhere but I haven't been able to find it yet). Then it split the main beam of the house, shattered various pieces of the wall, blew out a 4x4 foot hole in the wall (which was found 30 feet away, shown in the photo above and below), exploded the 2x4 studs, then shattered the window downstairs.
It traveled into the house via an extension cord -- (1) in the "before" photo above -- the Workshop didn't have power, pardon the pun, at the time. This extension cord was draped over a porch light (2). The lightning frayed the length of the extension cord (wires were pulled out every half inch, in fact it embedded pieces of the orange plastic from the extension cord as it was blowing out the porch light - got a picture of that somewhere too). Even though the extension cord continued downward from the light (3), the lightning ignored it, because its ultimate destination was inside the house.
Now inside the house, the lightning ran throughout the wiring, shooting fire out of all the outlets and switches (which were blackened, see photo), exploding all the light bulbs that were in sockets, burning out all appliances that were plugged in. It then went downstairs through the wiring and jumped (burning a hole in the wall) a foot from the floor freezer's outlet to the water pump, its final destination.
The outside phone wiring box was also blown about 20 feet away from the house, rendering the phone mute. This wasn't in the path of the lightning in the house -- I imagine the phone line in the driveway might have been the other part of a forked strike."
Lightning Strike 1987: Burned Light Switch
Lightning Strike 1987: Showing Path
THERE IS STILL MORE TO TELL ABOUT THIS STORY... somewhere buried deep in a box that hasn't been opened since the 1990s, there are additional photos, an audiotape and perhaps even the extension cord itself. When I find these items, I'll add them to this blog entry.
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