ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Lighting struck a tree on Pearl Street in Englewood with so much force that it broke into a thousand pieces.
Just about everyone heard the sound in this Englewood neighborhood around noon on Sunday.
“We heard a big bang,” Janice Beemer said.
Another neighbor described it as a bomb going off.
It’s a sound Dan Cronan said he didn’t hear so much as feel.
“It knocked me backwards,” Dan Cronan said. “I was flying and covered in glass.”
Dan Cronan had been standing at his front door with his dog when they were both blown back 10 feet after lightning struck a tree in his front yard.
“How he isn’t just having glass embedded in him and the dog from the windows blowing out is stunning,” said Nancy Cronan, Dan’s sister.
Nancy Cronan had come to see her brother after she got a text from him about what happened.
The tree violently exploded sending sharp pieces of bark into almost a dozen yards and rooftops, but amazingly no one was hurt.
“It’s taken a long time to even look and see how much destruction it caused,” Dan Cronan said.
In addition to the small pieces of bark, giant branches also slammed into the side of one home denting the siding and snapping off part of the fence.
Several of Dan Cronan’s windows were broken and his pickup in the driveway was also hit
“Pretty big pieces of wood mashed into my truck and beat my truck,” he said.
But, it’s inside Dan’s home that you can see the major damage.
A large branch, which is still attached to the tree outside, shot through the side of the foundation of his home.
Clean-up crews worked for hours Sunday, sawing off branches near electrical lines and vacuuming up glass.
There was so much damage from one strike, Dan Cronan still can’t believe he survived.
“A little bit lucky. Yeah, it was something else,” he said.