WESTFIELD – The chances of a parked car being struck by lightning are vanishingly small but a Big Wood Drive resident hit the trifecta of unlikely occurrences Sunday when three vehicles in her driveway were struck by lightning.
A 911 caller reported at 5:44 p.m. Sunday that her vehicle was struck by lightning and was smoking.
The responding firefighters report they arrived to find three vehicles – a 1999 Audi and a 2004 Jeep Cherokee belonging to residents and a visiting 2010 Nissan Pathfinder – had been struck by lightning but none were burning.
Nobody had been in the vehicles and the firefighters report that the electrical system of each vehicle had been damaged.
In an unrelated incident, an alarm company alerted police at 5:59 p.m. that an alarm had been received from a South Broad Street business and a company representative subsequently advised police that the alarm had been activated when lightning struck the building causing a brief interruption of electrical power.
The locations of the two lightning strikes are roughly 1.1 miles apart.
