‘I am so lucky I wasn’t there’: Lightning hits woman’s Leitrim home for second time

Whoever said lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place would do well to pay a visit to the home of Nollaig McGreevy in Carrick-on-Shannon, where she is still picking up the pieces following the second bolt from the blue in just a few years.

As this week dawned, she was vaguely aware that the hot and humid weather Ireland has been experiencing in recent days would make storms likely, but it didn’t cross her mind that she would be thunderstruck within hours and caught up in an electrical storm that would leave her home in bits.

It had already happened to her once so what were the odds of it happening again?

The first lightning strike on her home several years ago wasn’t that extreme, she said. In fact, she only noticed she’d been hit when the electronics in her home started to malfunction in the days after the storm. When she investigated, she was shocked to learn that the cause of the problems was a lightning strike.

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By contrast, the second round of thunder bolts and lightning were very, very frightening.

“I wasn’t really aware of the first strike at the time it happened,” she told The Irish Times. “To be honest, I was oblivious to it initially because the damage wasn’t so severe and I might not have noticed it at all if it hadn’t burned out my television, my modem and my landline.”

But second time round, the lightning meant business.

“I was coming home from work on Monday evening in the middle of a bad storm. I was driving through the lightning and by the time I got to the town it was flooded and traffic was at a standstill.”

The jam meant she was late getting home. “When I reached my house I noticed that the top of one of my chimneys was gone. It was in the garden and it looked like it had just exploded,” she said.

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When she went into the house her kitchen and living area were “full of smoke and there was a really bad smell of burning coming from behind my TV and the walls were scorched”.

Her television box and modem were both “incinerated”.

Initially she thought that was the extent of the damage. Then she went upstairs. “I could see the lightning had struck my roof and put a hole in the centre of it and then travelled around the eaves and burned the television and phone cables.”

It kept going around the eaves until it reached a dormer window. “It didn’t have anywhere to go then so it burst through the wall into my en suite,” she said.

While she said she was really unlucky to have had her home hit by lightning twice, she was also extremely fortunate to have been delayed at work. “I am very lucky because my neighbours said they heard the bang. I am so lucky I wasn’t there. I got delayed at work and I thought I’d never get home but I’m very glad I didn’t.”

She said she had started investigating what made her home such a lightning magnet. “The house is exposed and on a hill,” she said. “I’ve started looking into getting a lightning rod but it’s a specialist thing so I think I will have to get a dedicated provider to install it. It will be worth it if it means I don’t get hit again.”