Whether you were personally struck, your horse was struck out in the field, your neighbor or friend got hit, electrical outage?..
I wasn’t close, but lightning struck my house when I was a kid. When we got home, most of our appliances and electronics were broken. My Xbox (the original one) was sitting on the garage floor above some rebar embedded in the concrete. The lightning went through the Xbox into the rebar and blew a chunk of concrete and the Xbox across the garage. RIP Xbox.
Insurance paid for most of it after they came out and verified we were indeed struck by lightning.
In my teens in the mountains of Colorado there were tons of lightning strikes. One summer, a lightning strike in our driveway took out our garage door openers and a TV.
This past summer, I did a 40+ mi bike ride that covered some very open areas of the CO plains. At my turn-around spot I could tell a storm was moving in quick and thought, “ah well, some sprinkles will feel alright.” Then I rode for about 9 miles in a downpour with lightning crashing around me while on a dirt road with just about nothing else around me (me swearing aloud the whole time). Finally got to some relative safety of some tight rock outcrops with overhangs. I was still outside and not totally safe, but it felt good to get out of that scary situation as much as I could for a bit while the storm passed.
Lightning touched down in my neighbor’s yard. My wifi access point and my laptop battery both got cooked, and I may have accidentally tought my kids a new word.
The laptop was plugged in right? As in, not induced currents
Yeah the charger was connected. I’ve since bought a proper UPS with a proper surge protector.
40 feet away, it struck a manhole cover in the center of a cul-de-sac. Saw it from inside my house, it felt like an earthquake, sounded deafening, and may have peed a little.
It hit a car in a parking lot I was standing in. Roughly 50-100ft away. Really really bright! Really really loud!
I was in late middle school, like 11 or 12 years old, walking down the street with my friend Chris, and there was a bolt of lighting right near us. I don’t know how close it was, I saw white and heard the loudest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It felt like it struck 10 feet up the road. I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever run.
Tree got hit split it in half and destroyed a house. Some bullets can’t penetrate trees fully and lightning cuts it in half. Goes to show you nature is more terrifying than you think.
I lived across the street from a power distribution station. One night while I was outside, there was a lightning strike there, and it lit up the sky like daylight for 2-3 full seconds, and the power for the whole town went out.
It hit close enough to shock my through my all aluminum laptop. Felt like getting kicked in the chest. Somehow both me and the laptop were ok.
One strike exploded a tree in the back yard overnight, so I was about 30 feet away. I’m a fairly heavy sleeper when it comes to noise but it woke me up anyway.
Couple years ago, lightning struck a tree on our neighbor’s property across the street. We didn’t see the strike, but we heard it; the tree basically exploded. Some of the branches fell onto the power lines and started an electrical fire, so it was a whole big thing. Bunch of people standing out on their driveways watching the police and fire department trying to deal with it.
One night I was lying in bed around midnight, trying to get to sleep when a bolt struck a hundred feet or so down the street from me. It was spring so I had the windows open and it was fucking loud. Took me a while to calm down and start to doze off again, so of course that’s when the fire engines arrived to investigate the scene with their sirens going full blast.
I swear to god lightning came down a few feet away from us one day when I was hiking with my mom and her friend. For a year or so afterwards I got nervous whenever it looked like it might storm
Approximately 25-30 meters. Hit the middle of the street while I was watching out of a window from an elevation of about 10m. It was an experience.
idk how close the closest one has been, because I’m usually inside when it’s storming. everyone in the midwest knows it’s the best time to sleep.
I do know there was one several hundred feet from my house a couple years ago, because it blew a tree apart.
