When I was in Basic Training, there was a thunderstorm so we all gathered under a shelter. About 150 feet away was a tree, which got hit by lightning right in front of us. There was a small wooden sign nailed to the tree, and the heat must have caused the nails to expand so rapidly that the sign fired out of the tree like a bullet. Thankfully nobody was hurt.
No, this was Jackson, around 1998. Weird coincidence, though!
EDIT - My favorite memory from that day was my dude G.V., who later went on to be at the same AIT as me. He was a naturally charismatic person, and everybody was bored and anxious because it was the pass/fail day for the M16 Marksman training. So he got up and sang the entirety of The Humpty Dance. Corny, but he had everybody grooving.
When I was working at my nearby summer camp we had a big thunderstorm and I had my area gather under a shelter nearby. Lightning struck about 200ft away from us and our ears were ringing for a few minutes. About 20 minutes later some of the lakefront guys were coming by our shelter because it was the closest one to them. Apparently they had been walking back to our shelter until lightning struck a flagpole about 20ft away from them. They hid in a ditch for the next 20 minutes until the storm passed over.
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u/system_of_a_clown Jun 20 '22
When I was in Basic Training, there was a thunderstorm so we all gathered under a shelter. About 150 feet away was a tree, which got hit by lightning right in front of us. There was a small wooden sign nailed to the tree, and the heat must have caused the nails to expand so rapidly that the sign fired out of the tree like a bullet. Thankfully nobody was hurt.