Thunderstorm!

It began as an ordinary Tuesday evening.

Went to karate at 7. On many Tuesdays, Dan (who owns the school) and I get a pizza and sit around watching whatever sport is on TV. Sometimes we play video games. Tonight, we watched the Red Sox win, followed by South Park. When I opened the door to leave, I was greeted by a truly excellent barrage of lightning. We both dig thunderstorms, and the weather website was telling us to prepare for a doozy, so we grabbed a couple of beers and popped the tailgate on the truck.

Then came the bad ideas: The view would be much better from the roof of the dojo. So, a short while later, we were watching the storm roll in from up top of the school. Lots of lightning, lots of wind, more lightning, more wind. We decided that at the very first raindrops, we would get our butts back down the ladder. That was a really good call, as it turns out. We hauled ass down the ladder the instant we felt rain, and I still had barely gotten to the ground when the deluge started. We took shelter, first on the porch of the dojo, then inside when we were driven there by the rain.

At that point, his roof began to leak violently around the new air conditioner that he had installed a couple of weeks ago. Cue one really irritated friend.

So the storm was good, we watched it. I took advantage of a lull between cloudbursts to travel the 200 feet home.

About half an hour later, Dan called my cell phone: “Dude! Lightning struck one of the tankers in the bay! It’s exploding on local television!” Of course, there was no real choice in the matter: After a short conversation, I was back in my car. Picked Dan up at the dojo, and then it was off to the overlook by the bike path. On the way, we passed a lot of debris. Large pieces of trees were in the road, and power was off throughout the area.

Parked at the overlook, jumped out of the car, and immediately saw trees across the path. Three separate trees had been knocked down across the bike path. We climbed over those, and joined a small crowd who were watching the fires burn, across the bay. Police boats were plying back and forth, and a tower of flame was clearly visible. We almost didn’t notice the continuing rain. The continuing lightning was harder to ignore. Eventually, it became clear that no further explosions were to come.

Things sort of petered out from there, we made our way back up the path. We debated whether this level of damage merited survivalist tactics including looting and pillaging, and decided that basic rules of civic life still applied. Therefore, I dropped Dan back at the dojo (with much cursing of the folks who installed the AC) and back to home. Now I’m watching live coverage which indicates that:

(a) a tanker was unloading gasoline this evening
(b) lightning struck either the vessel, or the pipe between it and the huge fuel tanks just outside of the downtown area.
(c) there were no injuries, either among the ships crew, the dock workers, or the firefighters
(d) firefighters were *right there*, man, and got things under control. We apparently have a good reaction plan for “fire next to the huge fuel tanks”
(e) the mayor showed up and gave nice quotes.

With that, off to bed. Excellent night. It gets an A+.

–EDIT–

I think that this is the dock that was burning.

On this perspective, I was standing on the lower right of the map, where the bike path comes around the pond on the east side. We were looking a little bit north of East.

I forgot a part: We were standing and watching the fires burn, and I asked “what happens if those huge tanks of fuel behind the fire go?” He answered “we die.” I was like “nah, not really, right? We’re, like, 2000 feet away!” “No, there was debate over this when they built those tanks. If they go, do does most of downtown, and we go too.”

I quietly intensified my rooting for the fire boats at that point.

–EDIT 2–

Here’s the initial news report