I tried looking on Google to see if it is possible to see lightning actually strike close by without hearing thunder. A lot of what I see says it is not possible that close.

"Is it possible to have thunder without lightning?
No, it is not possible to have thunder without lightning. Thunder is a direct result of lightning. However, it IS possible that you could not hear the thunder because it was too far away. Sometimes it is called "heat lightning" because it occurs most often in the summer."

From: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/faq/
A good read about lightning.

Was your neighbor actually having a BBQ at the time? If so, they could have done something with a large grill to cause a high flame. I have a tiny charcoal grill, but on those big grills you can make it flame really high. It could be coincidental, that and the lightning. Did you actually see the bolt seemingly close with the fire by or did you see it more when it seemed far away and happened to notice the fire after?

Or, maybe you just didn't notice the sound? Did anything rattle? I can't even recall if the time I saw lightning strike if the window rattled.

I do see something from that page that might possibly give some kind of explanation:



"What causes thunder?
Thunder is caused by lightning. The bright light of the lightning flash caused by the return stroke mentioned above represents a great deal of energy. This energy heats the air in the channel to above 50,000 degrees F in only a few millionths of a second! The air that is now heated to such a high temperature had no time to expand, so it is now at a very high pressure. The high pressure air then expands outward into the surrounding air compressing it and causing a disturbance that propagates in all directions away from the stroke. The disturbance is a shock wave for the first 10 yards, after which it becomes an ordinary sound wave, or thunder. Thunder can seem like it goes on and on because each point along the channel produces a shock wave and sound wave."



If you were really close, maybe it could be more than 30 feet. I do see some things that talk about some lightning being weaker. Maybe you could have a bolt from far away be so close that you have some kind of shock wave hit you and you don't hear the sound? I don't know.

I had a very loud bit of thunder near me today. I meant to look to try to see how far the cell was that produced it. I didn't save the radar, but based on just measuring in Google Earth to about where the cell was nearest to me, it was probably between 8 to 10 miles from the storm, if it came from the very edge. It seemed very far away. In fact I was planning on swimming for a few minutes because I thought I had time since it didn't seem to be moving much at all. I can't remember if I had already decided to wait until later or if that was what made me wait. (My dad had mentioned about needing rain at the time so we looked at the radar and that is how we saw the rain.) I'm not sure how close the bolt itself was, but it was pretty loud. It could have been a mile or two away though toward the storm.

That happens around here sometimes. Someone died, maybe it was last month or the month before, from a bolt out of the blue. Here is how much I know. Before I found that page above, I would have said it can strike perhaps a dozen miles, maybe 15 miles, away from the storm. WRONG!!!



"A "Bolt from the Blue" is a cloud-to-ground flash which typically comes out of the back side of the thunderstorm cloud, travels a relatively large distance in clear air away from the storm cloud, and then angles down and strikes the ground. These lightning flashes have been documented to travel more than 25 miles away from the thunderstorm cloud. They can be especially dangerous because they appear to come from clear blue sky.

A helmeted bicyclist experienced a lightning strike to the head under fair weather conditions with a cloudless sky. It was determined that the bolt probably originated in a thunderstorm that was about 16km away and obscured by mountains.

Lightning strikes the ground approximately 25 million times each year in the U.S. According to the NWS, the chance of an individual in the U.S. being killed or injured during a given year is one in 240,000. Assuming an average life-span of 80 years, a person's odds over their lifetime becomes one in 3000. Assuming the average person has ten family members and others with whom they are close, then the chances are one in 300 that a lightning strike will closely affect a person during their lifetime."



1 in 3000?!? Then that page also says this:



"Over the entire year, the highest frequency of cloud-to-ground lightning is in Florida between Tampa and Orlando. This is due to the presence, on many days during the year, of a large moisture content in the atmosphere at low levels (below 5,000 feet), as well as high surface temperatures that produce strong sea breezes along the Florida coasts."



I never knew the chances were 1 in 3000. I knew central Florida was the highest in the U.S., maybe North America or the Americas, but I didn't know nationally the odds were that high. That means our odds locally are a lot higher. Yikes.

Of course on rare occasions people get struck and killed a large distance away. I forgot how far the person that died who was on the beach was away. I think I recall a meteorologist in Tampa saying they were about 10 miles away. Honestly I thought the storm near me today was further. I was thinking about driving distance, not how the crow flies. I thought it was probably 15 or 20 miles away since it was across Tampa Bay in the middle of the county over from me. (Usually I am more careful. At least I am now because of the incidents like that where people do get killed around here.) Of course I didn't realize 15 or 20 miles might not necessarily be safe. Usually I use the rule that once you can hear thunder, you don't go near water. Of course, sometimes that first clap of thunder is very, very loud, and I assume close. I guess if you are planning on doing something outside, you need to check the radar. In most summer here I don't get as much rain as everybody else. This summer was different. However, usually, the thunderstorms fire not too far inland from me. I thought plenty far enough that getting struck by lightning was not a problem. Now I know better!

I have only seen lightning actually strike something once. It was a long time ago, back when I still had a doorbell. (Lightning later got that, the speakers throughout my house, my computer, and nearly half a dozen neighbors lost a lot of stuff too after lightning struck the light pole in front of my house.) The time I saw it I was washing some dishes, naturally, and looking out the window at the time I saw the strike. I don't think there was much thunder at the time and it was lightly raining. (I would like to say there was no thunder and that I wasn't stupid enough to be washing dishes at the time, but I can't recall.) All of a sudden everything went white. I'm not really sure if I ever saw the bolt itself. I might have, because I could tell about which tree it hit before it became obvious. Lightning had struck a tree just across from my canal, just 250 feet away. Personally, I don't remember much of any sound. I've heard thunder so many times before very close by, enough to rattle the windows and enough to make me take notice. My dad thought it was a lot louder and he thought the doorbell went off when I happened to remark at some point in the future that the doorbell had not gone off which seemed odd for it being so close, which on rare occasions did happen when we had thunder really close by, or at least the sound sure was. I just don't remember much sound. It's possible the lightning itself was so shocking to see that the sound did not register with me, but I didn't jump at all, it was more amazing and not scary at the time. (A massive amount of sound would have scared me and that has actually happened several times this summer where the first indication of thunder is a really, really loud boom that rumbles the windows and has the sound echo back and forth for maybe 15 seconds sometimes between houses and down the canal next to my house too perhaps.) The tree actually caught fire, but barely. In about 30 to 45 seconds or so it went out, and it may not even have been the rain that put it out. (I'm not sure how easily palm trees burn.) I'm not sure if I would have seen smoke, since it was hardly on fire. Only where it hit I think was glowing red and the fire did not spread. It was just a small stretch vertically up the tree. Somehow it burned the small part of the trunk of the palm tree, but I don't recall anything regarding the palm fronds looking affected.

We get lightning strikes around here sometimes. It's damaged various other things at my house throughout the years, like several phone modems many years ago. It blew up my neighbors chimney a long time ago. I think that was what caused a large window we have to shatter too. That would have been when I was very young. Although it may have been wind, I forget, like what destroyed our screen enclosure decades ago before my dad redid it much more securely. Something made the window vibrate and shatter.

One of the local meteorologists I follow on Facebook posted some video today of a lightning strike on YouTube from a few days ago in TN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7MTeWvLAW0

From twin waterspouts over Lake Michigan to Colorado flooding today, a lot of weather things going on.
Twin waterspouts: https://www.facebook.com/US.NationalWeatherService.Milwaukee.gov

The first bit of thunder never translated to any rain tonight for me from that storm. However, later on in the evening after I did get to go swimming, another rain shower moved through. And being all wet already I went outside and got this picture:

Just to the left of this picture is where the palm tree I saw get struck probably around five years ago. At the time, I don't think those palm trees were as big, because I remember finding it a little odd that it struck the palm tree instead. (although lightning doesn't always strike the tallest object.)