‘The whole house shook’: Lightning strikes Wiscasset home

Mon, 09/12/2016 - 1:15pm

Neil and Lisa Page were inside their home at 122 Clark Drive in Wiscasset late Sunday morning when lightning flashed right behind the house. The next flash was even closer.

“Then I went, ‘God, did you see that,’” Page said he called out to his wife. “She said, ‘Yup.’ Then all of a sudden, bam. It hit right on us. I said, ‘That was close.’ And she said, ‘Pieces of the chimney are flying all over the back yard.’”

It turned out the chimney had been hit and there was other damage on, in and outside the two-year-old home.

“The whole house shook,” Page said. The strike blasted several bricks off the top of the chimney. One brick smashed the front windshield of one of the family vehicles parked in the driveway. Showing a reporter around the front and back yards hours later, he was still finding more bricks scattered on the ground.

Page had called 911 shortly after the lightning hit. The couple smelled smoke, but he and Wiscasset Fire Chief T.J. Merry said no smoke or fire showed at any point.

The chimney will need repairs, Merry said in a phone interview from the fire station after returning from the call.

There was other damage, Page discovered. Some of the electrical equipment was hit, the land phone line was out and his satellite cable, charred. And the couple’s new 65-inch television, turned off but plugged in, was fried, he said.

Although there would be much to fix and hire people to fix, he was glad the damage was not worse and no one was hurt. When the lightning struck, he was in one of the bathrooms but his wife was at the kitchen table, “near the chimney,” he added.

They have insurance but were not sure yet how much of the damage would be covered, Page said.

The lightning strike to the chimney was reported at 11:52 a.m., Merry said.

A severe thunderstorm warning that included Lincoln County had expired about 20 minutes earlier, meteorologist Nikki Becker of the National Weather Service’s Gray office said.  “But there can still be lightning” after a warning lifts, she said.

The storm was part of a line that stretched from off the Massachusetts coast north to Caribou, Becker said. That whole area the storms covered in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine received 66 cloud-to-ground strikes, she said.

Clark Drive is off Gardiner Road or Route 27, near the Dresden line.