San Juan Island experienced intense thunder and lightning on Wednesday, March 26, bringing eerily beautiful skies and lightning strikes.

“It was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard,” Brian McGlynn, whose property on Heron Lane off of Yacht Haven was struck during the storm, described. He knew immediately that it was lightning. “It was like staring into a flash camera – an intense light flash. They say for every second between the flash and sound is one mile. That night, it was instant.”

It wasn’t a mystery where the lightning hit – a giant tree in McGlynn’s yard exploded with the impact. Wood shards traveled across the whole property, his roof was damaged, his garage door opener and dish satellite stopped working, a switch box in the well house blew up, and every breaker in the house shut down.

“I could’ve charged every Tesla on the planet!” he joked. “Maybe I should go to church more often.”

Other islanders witnessed the breathtaking cloud formations that the storm brought. Lindsay Athena Dogey pulled over to take a photo while driving in the car with her son.

“Two minutes after taking the photo, we were in the eye of the storm,” she said. “At that point, I couldn’t tell if the wind was swirling around us or in what direction it was blowing. There was a downpour that my windshield wipers could not keep up with, and lightning strikes nearby.”

She said that it was only a matter of minutes, just as quickly as the storm approached, that it was gone.

“Three basic ingredients are required for a thunderstorm to form,” according to NOAA’s website. “Moisture, rising unstable air (air that keeps rising when given a nudge), and a lifting mechanism to provide the nudge.”

Places with warm, moist air coming off the ocean, like California and Florida, see thunderstorms much more frequently than the PNW with its cold ocean air. The island had suddenly much warmer-than-average temperatures on Wednesday, according to Weather Underground, which contributed to the unusually strong lightning storm.

Luckily, no severe damage was reported, Mayor Ray Jackson already repaired McGlynn’s Dish Network, and beautiful photos were captured by those who got to witness the storm.

Contributed photo Lindsay Athena Dogey The storm swirls overhead from Roche Harbor Road.

Contributed photo by Darlene Webb The storm over the Port of Friday Harbor.