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Lightning hits commissioner's tree
Friday, June 12, 2009
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Last week's severe thunderstorm brought with it an abundance of lightning and some hail. The old Bell Motor used car building in Leonardtown was struck by lightning, blowing some bricks and other debris down.
Another lightning bolt gave Commission President Francis Jack Russell (D) a start at his home at St. George Island last Tuesday.
Lightning struck a tree in his yard, while he was home, stripping 40 feet of bark off it.
"It was a terrible crack. I saw it as it hit," he said Thursday. "I've never heard anything worse than that other than when that barge at Piney Point exploded." In the early morning hours of Dec. 20, 1986, a barge exploded off the pier of the Steuart Petroleum Company there in Piney Point, killing four.
Russell said the sound of that explosion woke him straight up out of bed.
He described the lightning damage to the tree "as though someone took a chisel and peeled the bark off 3 inches wide up the tree. Good thing no one was seeking refuge under it at the time."
Russell lives at the end of Piney Point Road on the island at the mouth of Island Creek, home of the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab.
