Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 196, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1910 — RAIN AND THUNDERSTORM WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. [ARTICLE]

RAIN AND THUNDERSTORM WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.

Lightning Accompanied the Severest Storm of Summer, But No Serious Damage Resulted. A heavy rainstorm came up at about 3 o’clock Wednesday afternoon and was accompanied by flashes of lightning and loud claps of thunder that evidently were striking some place withing the corporate limits of th 3 town. For about a half hour there was a heavy downpour and then the storm moderated somewhat and there was no more rain during the afternoon or night. At about 10:30 today, Thursday, it began to rain again, however, and looked much like an all day downpour.

While Wednesday afternoon’s storm seems quite general over the County, there are a few places reported to have missed it almost altogether. At the Tyler farm in Hanging Grove township, for instance, they were able to continue threshing, having had only a little sprinkle. Both east and west of there the rain fell heavily. While there were three especially loud claps of thunder, following flashes of lightning that seemed to strike in Rensselaer, no severe damage was done, although it looked for a time as though Ed Karnatz, a tailor att Zimmerman’s, had received his everlasting. He was working on the long bench in the work room at the Zimmerman merchant tailoring shop,

and George Burdin, another tailor, was standing at the side of the bench and between Eddie and the window at the east side of the room. When the first loud clap of thunder came Burden states that he saw what seemed to be a ball of fire enter the window and roll past him on the bench and right toward Karnatz. Burdin jumped back and Karnatz let out a scream that would have made a Sioux chief envious. Burdin thought Karnatz was fooling, but) when he did not try to get up from the position he had fallen to, he ran to his assistance and found that he was unconscious. He recovered partially but when another flash came he again fainted and again a third time. He was unable to move around for more than an hour, suffering a nervous shock particularly. This morning he seemed but little worse for the experience, but regards it as a mighty close call, which It no doubt was. Lights in John Healy’s house were burned out, the shock being so severe there as to break the fastenings where the wires entered the house. At the college the lightning struck in the grove, shattering a tree. The Telephone Co. suffered a SIOO loss by burning out of instruments. The rainfall Wednesday afternoon was 0.80 Inch, while last Monday and Monday night it was an inch and a half. There was a steady downpour here from 11 to 12:30 today, which will probably add another Inch to the total.