A Rogue Storm
The thunderhead developed overnight while most of us slept, building up, like some sort of silent, ravenous beast. The storm surprised many weathermen in both how quickly it formed, and how isolated it was. According to one satellite image, the storm was nearly the size of Washington County itself, forming over the county, and dying out before it moved much further east. And as the little hamlet of Garden Home began its day, we were given a show that none of us will soon forget. |
| The charred remains of a Douglas Fir tree, only hours after it was struck by lighting in the large rogue thunderstorm that struck the area on Wednesday. the tree burned, before breaking in half. -S. Kramer, Photograph |
The lightning didn’t strike our house, though from the sound of the thunder and how quickly it appeared after the flash, I could have sworn it did. Two of my family members reported feeling a shock. It jarred me out of sleep, something between a rocket on takeoff and cannon fire, and kept me there for several hours, sitting in bed, sheets wrapped around me while creeks nearly four feet wide appeared in the street as nearly 1/2 inch of rain that fell over the course of the half hour. Then the rogue storm disappeared as quickly as it arrived: after about half an hour, the storm simply stopped, the thunder vanishing as quickly as it had arrived. The robin was the first to break the silence that followed, and it was his song that finally lulled me back to sleep.
A thunderstorm is unusual in the Portland area, but due to the warm weather we have been having, there have been a few over the past week, but this was the first one to hit this close to home...literally. At first we believed that the ruckus that roused us up was a cloud burst, overhead, and since we hadn’t lost power, the long term consequences of the storm weren’t evident. However the thunder that shook the house was the result of an actual strike, less than a mile away. Being Portland, this made instant headlines, and locating the site of the strike was easy enough: follow the news helicopters. We all see videos or the lucky picture of lightning strikes, and it’s easy to happen upon trees in the woods that were struck. However, it’s different when the lightning strike site is as fresh as this one.
The Victims
One of the casualties was immediately noticeable: a fir tree, it’s trunk charred and the top of the tree missing collapsed as the tree was weakened by fire. FOr a moment I assumed this to be the only tree damaged: it took me a moment to notice the more dramatic of the three victims. Next to this were two sequoia trees, splintered, like a giant ax had descended on them, ripping off their crowns and splitting the trunk nearly to the ground. Shards of all three trees were scattered across two roofs. The owner of the sequoia trees seemed very quiet, but was open to chatting for a few minutes. The mulcher would be arriving soon, he explained, and he would miss the shade. Another neighbor had caught the burning fir tree on camera and was eagerly showing pictures. |
| One door down, the lightning struck two sequoia trees splitting this one like a hatchet, shattering it on impact, and and sending pieces of the tree in every direction. -S. Kramer, Photo. |
A utility truck was on site, as well as a news van, with one of the shards that was a fir tree leaning against its bumper. I imagined a newscaster dramatically holding it in front and yelling about how this was once a fir tree. I can’t blame her if she did that: the power in lightning is hard to comprehend. I have said before that waterfalls are the best way to see how mighty God’s power is, but I was forced to reconsider. I looked across to the splintered mast that had once been a sequoia tree. A ghost of it’s former glory, I assumed it would soon fall to the mulcher. No one had likely ever imagined this tree would die like this. Most trees don’t: they get disease, or get cut down, or in the case of sequoias, grow into behemoths. But very few Sequoia trees literally explode!
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