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Several firsts for today's spotting venture; my first Independence Day chase and my first three-in-a-row flood chases in the Denver area. Up until about 7:00pm this evening, I had nailed my forecast. My thoughts were Denver was going to be between two areas of storms; one up near Cheyenne, WY and the other in Colorado Springs. Storms fired in both locations, but the Cheyenne storms moved southward into Eastern Colorado and laid out a boundry which flushed against the foothills and aided in late evening storm development. I watched the storms near Boulder on radar til a blip showed up over Northwestern Arvada when my lady and I headed out to I-70 and north to the Wadsworth (at I-70) exit where I headed back south and then east on 38th to get back to Kipling. While on the phone with Jon Van de Grift, a lightning strike tagged a transformer less than 10 yards from the van. The bolt, which I saw between several trees, fried the top of the pole sending a shower of orange and blue sparks onto the road right in front of the van. Both my girlfriend and I felt the tingling in our hands for several minutes afterwards as I'm sure Jon had his ears ringing after hearing me shout. Unfortunately, there were no cameras running at the time. After the bolt, we returned to Kipling about 3 blocks south of I-70 and filmed some street flooding as nearly a foot of standing water covered Kipling. We skirted around Wheat Ridge to check for other areas before returning to the flood to shoot it as it subsided. We toasted our close encounter with some hot wings before returning home.
NWS Denver issued a tornado warning for the tail end of a developing line east of Denver. It was a quick warning which was replaced with a severe warning within about 20 minutes. I called Jon about it laughing, and he later emailed me with the story behind the warning (as a joke).. "Yeah, it looks pretty bad. We should probably issue a warning."
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