Lightning Strike Rocks the Towns of Little Meadows and Warren Center

Contributed by Jill Darling  —

“It sounded like a bomb went off,” said Pat Russell of Maple Street in Little Meadows. She and her daughter Carrie were relaxing in recliners last night when the loud explosion shook their home and caused items on shelves to fly off.

“The den lit up like a red ball of fire,” she exclaimed. They tried to calm their Golden Retriever, Brody, then looked around the house but didn’t notice anything.

Then they looked out the dining room window to see that one of their massive pine trees was a mangled mess on the ground. The tree was struck by a large bolt of lightning, causing it to crack from its top down to its roots and splinter into multiple pieces strewn across the lawn.

Next-door neighbors, Tom and Kristie Hunsinger, experienced the same thing: the house shaking and things falling off shelves. They looked outside to see that their pickup truck and minivan were encased in tree limbs.

An upstairs front window was broken, and an electrical wire had detached from the peak of the house. Penelec’s truck came an hour later, blocking the road briefly to reattach the electrical wire.

The next morning, their neighbor, Dave King, stopped by to assess the damage and, pointing out his truck window, said that he had planted those trees as a kid with his dad, Andy King, along with the previous homeowner, Bob Beeman. Dave King figured the row of trees had to be 70-years old.

Whitetail’s Bar & Grill owner, Jeff Kuhr, stopped to look at the destruction. “Holy Hell,” he exclaimed. When asked if he heard the explosion, he quipped, “The whole town heard it! Everyone’s asking, ‘How far did you jump?’”  

Kuhr lives on Cemetery Road across a large field from the property. He said the strike lit up the entire field with whitish-blue light.

The National Weather Service says it was a rare positive lightning strike conducting a positive charge from the clouds to the ground. Positive lightning strikes make up only about five percent of lightning strikes, according to the weather service.

Not only did the townspeople of Little Meadows hear the explosive sound, but three miles away, Pete Darling of Warren Center was jolted by it and said, “It was the loudest sonic boom-like sound I’ve heard in my life!”

The noise rattled the Darlings’ Siberian Husky, Kodak, and he ran around to the back of the house to be let into the basement, which is his refuge during loud storms, Darling said.