Looking Back 1955: Guess what’s coming to breakfast?

It’s not unusual to hear stories of lightning striking a home and setting it on fire. According to Penny Electric in Las Vegas, lightning strikes about 1 in 200 houses every year. That means in a mid-size town and even in some small towns, there’s at least one incident of lightning striking a building each year.

However, how often do you hear about lightning passing through a home while people are inside?

In February 1955, this happened to a Parsons, West Virginia, couple. It was raining early in the morning on Feb. 28. Rain is not unusual in the town. Parsons averages about 176 days a year when it has rain. This was heavy rain, though, accompanied by thunder and lightning that probably served as a wake-up alarm for many people in town.

Joe Barrick and his wife were sitting in the kitchen of their home on Quality Hill that they rented from W. E. Swartz. The couple ate breakfast at the kitchen table while thunder boomed and the sky lit up like a strobe light.

A lightning bolt struck a tree in their backyard. It dug a hole in the ground near the tree and another hole about 10 feet away. Then it entered the home in two places.

“Shattering a window in the den, lightning also entered through the brick wall a few feet away, dislodging brick and plaster and burning the wall near the ceiling at eight different places in addition entered an adjoining bathroom, knocked plaster loose behind the lavatory,” the Cumberland Evening Times reported. “In the kitchen next to the bathroom, a florescent light was broken and all four walls burned. Two boxes of soap powder in the bottom half of a cabinet sink were knocked out and spilled on the kitchen floor.”

It did this while the Barricks ate. They barely had time to react to the raw electricity smashing through the kitchen before it passed into the cellar where it knocked a fuse box off the wall, shattered a drain pipe and dislodged stone and plaster from the foundation.

In the living room, all four walls were scorched near the ceiling. The lightning made a hole in the wall about “the size of two fists,” according to witnesses.

By some small miracle, the Barricks were unharmed and the house did not catch fire. The home’s wiring was badly damaged, but that could be repaired.

“Fire chief Corcoran said it was possible the fact the couple was sitting down probably saved their lives,” the newspaper reported. “Had they been standing, the bolt may have struck them, he added.”

Their home was not the only place struck by lightning, but it might have been the luckiest. It wasn’t burned or destroyed, and no one died.

The weather cleared later in the day. An electrician was hired to check the wiring throughout the house and rewire what had been ruined. The house was inspected and minor repairs made.

And the Barricks enjoyed telling the story of a one in a million lightning strike and how they shared breakfast with bolts of lightning.

James Rada Jr. can be reached at [email protected] or 410-698-3571.

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