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Also according to the Weather Service:
Friday morning, violent thunderstorms rumbled across Western Washington morning and left some surprising damage in their wake.
A Renton homeowner was thrown across a room when a bolt of lightning struck his house and subsequently started a fire that burned through the roof. The man was taken to Valley Medical Center to be treated for smoke inhalation.
In Ballard, Christina Barlow was working in a home she thought was hit by lightning.
“We were all frightened, and the light didn’t just go out; they burst,” she said. “They didn’t shatter, but it was pretty intense. It was an incredible sound.”
The first wave of storms rolled through the area before dawn. They were particularly intense, and at one point, radar data showed more than 500 lightning strikes per hour.
That early-morning lightning knocked out power to thousands in Clallam County. Electricity was back on by 11 a.m.
At one point, the severe weather rolling through Seattle had contributed to 79 outages that affected more than 700 customers, Seattle City Light said. Most of those customers were located in Queen Anne to North Seattle.
By Friday afternoon, the storms had tapered off in the Seattle area but were still affecting areas in the North Puget Sound region as well as areas of Kitsap County. One KIRO 7 Twitter follower said lightning hit a tree in Kingston as she drove by and “it sounded like a bomb going off.”
KIRO 7 Chief Meteorologist Rebecca Stevenson said it had been about five years since Western Washington had seen such an intense band of lightning storms.
Staff writer Brian Sandford contributed to this report.
