Longtime Pontiac Hospital nurse Liz Buehlow wasn’t expecting fireworks on the eve of her retirement after 40 years in the profession, and neither was she expecting a different kind of explosion that rattled her house on July 3.
Around lunchtime on Thursday, she was sitting in her home of 30 years on Shawville’s Maple Street, watching the news with her three dogs, when she heard a loud bang.
“I’d seen a bit of lightning, and heard thunder, and all of a sudden there was just an extreme bang, almost like a tractor-trailor came full force through the house,” Buehlow said.
Then, she said, the fire alarm went off, sounding four beeps before going quiet again. She went outside to check for fallen trees, but found none.
It was only when Buehlow, who has lost most of her sense of smell due to chronic sinus issues, began to detect a burning scent, that she knew something was awry.
As she traveled down her hall from the kitchen towards the bedrooms, the scent, which she described as a putrid burning rubber smell, grew in intensity.
Upon entering the bedroom, she saw the paper shade of the lamp that was sitting on the bedside table in the corner of the room had been blown to shreds. Scattered across the floor were shards of black plastic, also pieces of the lamp.
Closer inspection revealed a large hole had been blasted out of the plaster in the wall behind the lamp, revealing the steel mesh that supported it.
It was then that Buehlow realized the house might have been hit by lightning, so she called Shawville-Clarendon fire chief Lee Laframboise’s home phone number, not wanting to call 9-1-1 because nobody had been injured. Laframboise told her to call 9-1-1 immediately.
“He said, ‘Take your animals, and leave the house, and don’t go back in.’ So then it became a little more real,” Buehlow said.
“Everybody in Shawville said they heard the big bang,” Laframboise told THE EQUITY the following morning.
He said a survey of the home found a place in its exterior wall where the lightning current had likely traveled from a steel gate into the side of the house, dislodging a brick on its way.
He also found several more places in various rooms of the house where the current from the lightning had blasted a hole through the lath and plaster walls.
“[The current] just followed the steel mesh and just blew random holes in through the wall in different rooms,” Laframboise said, adding he had never seen anything like it.
“I called an electrician in and he investigated what he could. He didn’t see any damage to the wiring.”
Buehlow said she was let back into her home after about two and a half hours, but even after the thorough inspections had been completed, it took her some time to feel safe in her space again.
“It will be an interesting sort of feeling the next time we have another storm,” she said. “It’s given me a new outlook on the strength of a storm.”
Grateful neither she nor her pets were injured in the incident, Buehlow was able to laugh about the lightning strike’s timing, which was aligned with both her 30th year in her home, and her retirement from her career.
“A little more bang than I wanted,” she laughed.
