Article Contributed on: 2/2/2008 9:29:31 AM
It was Friday night about 9:30, and my wife and I just finished watching a movie in the basement. I got up from the couch to take the DVD out and we heard the loudest bang we have ever heard as a bright flash filled the room. We both stood there stunned and then I ran upstairs to see what happened.
My first thought was that a plane crashed into the neighbor's house. Christina later told me that she thought a meth lab exploded.
Adrenaline pumping, I ran into the street and looked around, but didn't see anything on fire or smell anything burning. I looked down the block and saw other people looking around.
I walked down to the corner where a crowd of people had gathered and they were all as perplexed as I was.
"Did you see a flash?", "Where did it come from?" ,"What was THAT?"
Then a neighbor across the street yelled, "Hey, I just talked to the cops and they said it was lightning!"
As soon as the words left his mouth, I felt the hair on my head stand up like someone had placed a statically-charged balloon above it. Then came a bright flash and another boom! The noise and light enveloped me and I couldn't tell where it came from. Instinctively, I ran as fast as I could back to the house, trying to gauge the distance between myself and the nearest trees, hoping that another strike wasn't coming.
On the street in front of our house I found large chunks of wood. A tree must have been hit, but it was too dark to see which one and nothing was burning. I made it into the carport, and couldn't believe that there was lightning in the middle of winter.
Then it started blowing snow. In less than 15 minutes we had half an inch of styrofoam-pebble looking snow covering the ground. It didn't last long and there was no more lightning. About half an hour later I walked outside again, and the clouds had all moved east and the sky was clear. Two police cruisers were parked on the corner, but everything looked ok.
This morning I woke up to assess the damage and saw that a tree across the street was down and it looked like the neighbors next door to it, where the cruisers were parked, had placed sheets of plywood over their windows. I hope no one was injured. There are two- and three-foot-long splinters of wood in nearly all our yards and even on my roof. The lightning must have shattered the tree, sending debris 100s of feet away. The strike even took out our satellite dish, which is at least a 100 feet away.
There's another tree down the block that looks like it was bent in half.
According to YourHub.com poster
Philip Rosenberg-Watt, the phenomena is called ThunderSnow. Check out his article
here. I looked it up and was surprised that the
Wikipedia article on Thundersnow already contained an entry on last night's storm: "The Denver metro area experienced a
[1]thundersnow around 9:30 p.m. on February 1, 2008, and a lightening strike during the storm damaged a home in Englewood, Colorado. "
I added a sentence about the trees that were hit on our block.