By Jennifer Brown | The Colorado Sun
A thunderstorm that turned roads into rivers and basements into swimming pools lit up the sky over Greeley on Tuesday night with flashes of light as bright as daytime. Three days earlier, a single lightning strike killed a Jackson County rancher and more than 30 of his cattle. Last week, a storm that raged over Yuma, rumbling like a freight train, buried the plains town in knee-deep hail.
It’s been an intense week, even for Colorado in the spring.
The state, known for its wild electrical storms that seem to come out of nowhere, is third-highest in the nation for lightning deaths. The fatal strike Saturday that killed a cattle rancher outside of Rand in northern Colorado was the 25th lightning death in Colorado since 2006, according to data provided by the National Weather Service in Boulder.
That’s more fatal lightning strikes than all but two other states — Florida, which had 88 during that time period, and Texas, with 39.