Sunday, August 20, 2006
The strangest thing that ever happened
I was almost struck by lightning, twice, on the same night, while sitting at my desk in the newsroom at The Daily Intelligencer in Doylestown, Pa.
I've had some odd things happen in my nearly three years as a real estate agent (and you'll hear more about them later), but nothing like the things that happened in my 26 years of working at a newspaper. I've endured bomb threats, blackouts and blizzards, but by far the strangest was the lightning incident.
It happened on a hot, humid summer evening. A summer thunderstorm was rolling in, and I could hear the thunder getting louder as it neared Doylestown. I could tell by the increasing noise of the thunder that is was a bad storm. Here's what happened next. I heard two things at about the same time. A huge thunderclap that sounded as though a bomb went off on the roof. Then I saw a flash of blue light out of the corner of my eye that appeared to have just missed my head. I heard a zap sound and smelled something like an electrical fire.
I sit at a cubicle, the kind you see in many offices, and when that bolt hit I managed to leap over the cubicle in one move. I don't know how I accomplished it, but I'm sure being scared to death helped.
Around 11 p.m. I was sitting at my desk and heard another thunderstorm approaching. I thought about moving eslewhere, but I believed that adage about lightning never striking the same place twice.
I was wrong. I heard another explosion, this one even louder and more frightening that the first, a second blue flash whizzing by my head, the zapping sound and the smell of an electrical fire.
I could not believe it happened again, but it did, and I was really shaken up. It seems that the lightning had struck an unused radio antenna that was connected to a police radio near the city desk, where I sat. The lightning bolt hit the antenna, went down through the building and arced to something else near my head.
There is still a burn mark on a piece of metal that marks where the lightning bolt arced. The company has since taken down the antenna. I moved to a new desk.
I've had some odd things happen in my nearly three years as a real estate agent (and you'll hear more about them later), but nothing like the things that happened in my 26 years of working at a newspaper. I've endured bomb threats, blackouts and blizzards, but by far the strangest was the lightning incident.
It happened on a hot, humid summer evening. A summer thunderstorm was rolling in, and I could hear the thunder getting louder as it neared Doylestown. I could tell by the increasing noise of the thunder that is was a bad storm. Here's what happened next. I heard two things at about the same time. A huge thunderclap that sounded as though a bomb went off on the roof. Then I saw a flash of blue light out of the corner of my eye that appeared to have just missed my head. I heard a zap sound and smelled something like an electrical fire.
I sit at a cubicle, the kind you see in many offices, and when that bolt hit I managed to leap over the cubicle in one move. I don't know how I accomplished it, but I'm sure being scared to death helped.
Around 11 p.m. I was sitting at my desk and heard another thunderstorm approaching. I thought about moving eslewhere, but I believed that adage about lightning never striking the same place twice.
I was wrong. I heard another explosion, this one even louder and more frightening that the first, a second blue flash whizzing by my head, the zapping sound and the smell of an electrical fire.
I could not believe it happened again, but it did, and I was really shaken up. It seems that the lightning had struck an unused radio antenna that was connected to a police radio near the city desk, where I sat. The lightning bolt hit the antenna, went down through the building and arced to something else near my head.
There is still a burn mark on a piece of metal that marks where the lightning bolt arced. The company has since taken down the antenna. I moved to a new desk.
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