WESTBROOK – Kelsey Couture, 18, a high school student home on April vacation, was barely awake when the first rumbles of thunder rolled through her neighborhood last week, but one lightning strike that landed at the edge of her back yard at 58 Old Farm Road got her up quickly.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before,” she said. “It was like someone had put a bomb in our back yard.”

On Thursday afternoon, that’s exactly what it looked like. Before the lightning struck on April 20, three tall trees, two of which were at least 150 feet high, stood in the back yard. Now, there is nothing left of two of them but splinters, and the one that is still standing is scarred and dead.

The lightning struck at 7:30 a.m., during a brief passing thunderstorm. Pat Creenan, 49, who lives next door to Couture at 68 Old Farm Road, said he was at home on vacation, and also in bed.

“Just a couple of rumbles went through, then there was this crash,” he said. “It shook the house.”

Couture’s father, Mike Couture, 41, said he had just left for work when his daughter called him up to tell him what had happened. When he returned, he found a mess where the three trees should have been. He called the fire department to inspect his home and yard, fearing the strike might have caused a fire.

In the back yards of both homes on Thursday, the damage to the trees was extensive. Splinters of the trees became spikes of wood more than a foot wide and at least 10 feet long. One of them landed sideways between two other trees and lay suspended. Others had fallen and stuck into the ground at various angles.

“We can’t even move it out of the ground,” Mike Couture said, as he grabbed the end of one and pulled.

While looking at that same piece, Creenan said, “I think that’s a piece of that one,” pointing to a broken stump about 20 feet away.

Fire Capt. Charles Jarrett said the lightning heated up the moisture inside the tree trunks, causing the explosive effect.

“All that moisture in the tree expands, kind of like steam, and that’s what blows it apart,” he said.

For two of the trees, all that remained were two stumps less than 20 feet tall. A third tree was not broken, but the lightning had traveled down one side, shaving off the bark as it went, in a line nearly 6 inches wide. The line went from ground level as far up the trunk as the eye could see. Mike Couture said the fire department told him the strike killed the tree.

“That’ll have to be taken down,” he said. “It’s dead.”

The lightning made its mark on the ground around the trees, too. Both the Coutures and Creenan said new fissures had appeared in the ground, where firefighters told them the lightning had traveled while following the moisture. Some of the fissures were several inches wide and deep, and stretched in a wavy path as long as 10 feet in some places.

The lightning traveled far enough underground to affect both homes. Creenan said some of his circuit breakers had tripped, as well as the mini-breakers in many of his ground-fault interruptor power outlets in his house. He said his cable TV service was knocked out for a while, and an alarm clock in the house was “fried,” but otherwise there was no damage.

The Coutures were hit harder. Jarrett said the lightning traveled into the Coutures’ leach field and just kept going.

“It followed the septic line back into the house,” he said. “It was the path of least resistance.”

That path knocked out the Coutures’ telephone, damaged a small television and burned out the power supply unit in a personal computer that was turned on during the strike. Smoke coming from that computer was part of the reason Mike Couture called the fire department. Even a second-floor window in Kelsey Couture’s room was cracked.

All the trees were at the edges of both back yards, well away from the houses and people, and no one, Jarrett said, was hurt. Jarrett said anyone standing too closely when the lightning came down “probably would have been electrocuted.”

Fortunately, Jarrett said, lightning strikes are rare. The last major lightning strike he remembered, he said, was about three or four years ago, when lightning struck a barn at the corner of Route 302 and Duck Pond Road.

Jarrett said he could not recall any lightning strikes in the city that have caused serious injury or death, and said it was unlikely the Coutures or the Creenans would have to worry about future strikes.

“The odds are very slim that it would happen again,” he said.

Sllm or not, the whole incident was unnerving for Kelsey Couture, who said the night after the strike, it was “a little hard going to bed.”

This is one of two trees that literally exploded after a severe lightning strike at 7:30 a.m. on April 20. Debris littered the back yards of two homes on Old Farm Road. The lightning knocked out some electronics in the area, but no one was hurt.(Staff photo by Sean Murphy)