SPOKANE, Wash. — Thousands of Spokane residents remain without power after severe thunderstorms and hail hit the area.
Fallen trees crushed vehicles and lightning strikes damaged homes and electronics across the city.
Crews worked to clear multiple trees that fell at Audubon Park. The damage spread throughout the area.
Sean Smith found his car destroyed after the storm.
“Honestly without having insurance…I’m not sure who to go to or where to go about it… It has been a fiasco and a frustrating one at that,” Smith said.
Near Finch Elementary, a large tree crushed another resident’s SUV. The owner said the city had told her the trees around her property were healthy and would not fall. She has contacted the city but has not heard back.
The Indian Trail neighborhood saw major damage from lightning strikes. Residents reported WiFi outages and broken appliances.
Lightning hit a tree on Osage Way with tremendous force.
“It was like a huge kaboom… I was like wow that was so loud it was almost like someone had set off a bomb,” said Christopher Savage, who saw the lightning strike.
The lightning traveled down the tree trunk and through the roots, causing the ground to explode and scatter rocks and wood chips across the street.
Mark Anderson’s property was hit by the lightning strike.
“This never happened like this before…We’ve had a lot of lightning storms before but never anything like this…It shook the whole house…And my wife and I ran to the living room to see if the kids were OK and they were crying and scared…It broke a window…And when we looked outside the tree was all damaged,” Anderson said.
The lightning strike was so strong that it knocked items off shelves inside nearby homes. Electronics stopped working throughout the neighborhood.
“In my house…All of the things on the window fell down…Our neighbor across the street had a couple of paintings on his wall fly off so it was not just the sound of it but a reverberation that happened in several of the houses around,” Savage said.
The City of Spokane said 311 received 45 reports of fallen trees. City crews cleared branches from parks across Spokane.
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