NORDLAND — When he heard the explosion after seeing the blinding flash of light Tuesday morning, Marrowstone Island resident Greg Seran realized lightning had struck close to home.
A few minutes later, a column of smoke spiraled skyward through a stand of trees as a storage shed at the back of Seran’s Reiner Road property burned to the ground.
The fire was caused one of three lightning strikes reported during an unusual storm that hit in east Jefferson County.
One of the other lightning strikes was near East Beach Road, and the third was on Sleepy Hollow Road on the Quimper Peninsula.
Seran, who has lived on Marrowstone Island for 14 years after moving from Minnesota, said he’s used to thunderstorms from living in the Midwest.
But this is one of the first he’s seen here.
He said the thunder was no different than he’s heard during Midwest storms.
Small but powerful
Scott Sistek, a meteorologist with KOMO-TV in Seattle, described the storm that produced the lightning strikes as “isolated, but intense.”
“The storm was so small that it didn’t show up on the radar screens,” Sistek told Peninsula Daily News during a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon.
He lives in the Mukilteo area and said he mistook the rumbling of thunder for military jets from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.
Firefighters from Chimacum, Irondale, Port Hadlock, Cape George and Marrowstone Island battled the fire in the storage shed and an adjacent pump house.
Firefighters arrived on the scene to find large and small pieces of fir trees scattered up to about 100 feet from where the single bolt of lightning exploded through bark and wood.
The tops of three trees were sheered off by the lightning bolt about 60 feet above ground level. One larger alder was split down the middle.
In all, five trees were damaged by the lightning strike.
