20th Anniversary Of My Lightning Strike

Today, June 17th, 2007 is the 20th anniversary of lightning striking my house in North Carolina. 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 job here at AccuWeather and resulted in this blog entry that you read today.

I have uploaded a number of photos to the AccuWeather.com Weather Photo Gallery showing details of the damage. In the description of each photo, note the details I have provided; each picture has an interesting story to tell.

I dug up my real-time account of the event, "blogged" on paper when I was 13 years old (as discussed before, I published "newspapers" depicting events at our house and forced Mom to read them between ages 11 and 16). Here are some excerpts:

The accompanying special fold-out map in the next day's edition covered the damage to the house and shop/guest house, noting various lights, sockets or switches that were blown out or blackened, along with detailing the glass and wood splinter debris fields

I even have an audio tape of the lightning strike event, buried somewhere in a dusty box I could not find today. The "boom box" on which I made the recording did not have batteries, so after the loud pop of the strike hitting 30 feet from it, the tape went dead. Sometime if I can locate that, I'll bring it to you.