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Southern Maine got pummeled by violent thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon. And as a Floridian, I feel the need to apologize to the weather of Maine because I was not familiar with its game as I was caught driving in these waves of storms myself and my car was pelted with hail.
Coming back from the L.L. Bean flagship store in Freeport yesterday, we stopped at the Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster Company in South Freeport on the way to Portland. They were apparently down a fryer and food was an hour plus wait which actually turned out to be fortuitous.
With the hour wait for food, we sat downstairs under the tent instead of upstairs on the open-air deck. No less than 15 minutes after ordering at the counter did the first violent wave of Maine storms come through with pitch black skies, torrential rain, and thunder.
The first wave didn’t last any more than 10 minutes but after we finished lunch I had to drop off some cousins in Portland and we took route 88 down through Falmouth and it was here we got stuck in the second, significantly more violent wave of Maine thunderstorms.
My car was pelted with hail. We called 911 at one point because an ancient tree that had been split in half from lightning had half-fallen onto power lines and was on fire. It looked like an electrical fire with the sparks from the power line jumping to the tree that was split in half.
About a half mile ahead the road was closed as another massive tree had stopped traffic. When we called 911 they said they were already responding to a nearby incident so presumably that was it. And we were rerouted back north and then around to 295.
Violent Maine Thunderstorms Rip The Roof Off Gorham House
This was all on the coast but in nearby Gorham, Maine to the East, the same wave of violent thunderstorms was dropping hail and ripping off roofs. One video has gone viral in social media from Steffen Olsen.
Olsen says he started filming just before this clip. Here we see the roof of the home go flying off!
I was out in Gorham on Saturday picking blueberries at some U-Pick farm and stopping at the Sebago Brewery and Saturday’s weather could not have been more beautiful. Blue skies in every direction.
But it was Mark Twain who said “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes” and that was certainly true last weekend. These storms we got caught in driving between Freeport and Portland seemed biblical.
I’m not exaggerating at all when I say I saw 4 lightning strikes touch ground at the same time as we were driving toward that storm cell. It was a nonstop light show on the horizon for maybe 15 minutes before we then got stuck in what seemed like a monsoon but with hail that was hammering my windshield and roof. Thankfully, it seems to have been small hail and my car didn’t sustain damage or at least not any visible damage that I’ve seen yet.
Homes and cars sustained damage
NEWS CENTER Maine AMS-certified meteorologist Ryan Breton shared a few photographs from the violent Southern Maine thunderstorms on his personal Facebook page:
From my personal vantage point, there were three distinct waves of the the thunderstorms. The first one crossed us just after we ordered food. The second wave was some time around 2:30. And the third wave was around 3:45 and by that point we were at a bar in Portland having a pint outside and got caught in the storm again, for the third time that day. But the third wave had distinctly less thunder than the previous two.
Content shared from brobible.com.