I've never really slept well during thunder storms. I always seem to wake up and then I count to see how far away the lightning is. So early Friday morning, August 3, 1989 I was awake, listening. It was raining really hard. There was a lot of lightning, some of it less than a 5 count away. (5 seconds = 1 mile). Suddenly, there was a bright white flash and boom at the same time. Now I was really awake. That lightning seemed to be on the back side of the house. Our bedroom is on the rear of the house, and the flash came from our window. It seemed like everything was ok, though. The night light was still on in the bathroom, so we still had power. Oh well, try to go back to sleep Bill.

Zap! Another flash and bang at the same time. This was different, it was white light from the back and a red flash from the direction of the living room. Now I jumped up and so did my wife. We both thought the house had been hit and the red was the house on fire. We searched the whole house. All the lights still worked and we couldn't find any evidence of fire. We did close a backdoor storm window that was open. Then we went back to bed.

No more close hits, and finally I went back to sleep. I woke up when my alarm went off. Off I went to the bathroom. My wife, Liz, got up shortly after that. She looked out the window and called me. Now we could see that our ash tree in the front yard looked a little strange. So did the house across the street. The tree had long strips of bark hanging off the trunk. The house across the street had several sections of vertical board siding missing. Both had apparently been hit by lightning.

I went out and took a few pictures of the tree and the neighbor's house. The tree was really sad. All the bark at the base of the tree was either blasted off or loose. There were pieces of bark all over the front yard. It had been hit quite high up, with the lightning mark going ail the way down to the ground. There was even a hole in the ground next to the trunk.

The house across the street was in worse shape than it looked. The siding that fell off had smashed the windshield on their car in the driveway. There were two holes in the roof and a little rain had come in. Fortunately, the heavy rain had prevented a fire from starting. Our tree was in the parkway and the village of Buffalo Grove cut the tree down on Saturday. I guess it was just about the only damage in town from the storm. We did get about 4 inches of rain from it. Last Thursday they replaced the tree with a red maple.