Members of a Co Cork family are sure to be counting their blessings after escaping a fire at their home over the weekend.
A man, his wife and their two children, a four-year-old and a toddler, were asleep inside the house in Ballymakeagh near Ballymacoda in the east of the county early on Sunday morning during a fierce thunderstorm.
They were woken up by a loud noise at around 1am and realised that the roof of the two-story house had been struck by lightning.
The couple moved quickly to get their children out of the house.
They took shelter in a neighbour’s house while calling the fire brigade.
Four units from the County Fire Service rushed to the house to attend the blaze, assisted by a water tanker from Cork City Fire Brigade.
They stayed on the scene until 8.30am.
There were no reported injuries but the damage caused to the house appears extensive – an image shared by Cork City Fire Brigade on Twitter shows that the roof was completely destroyed in the blaze.
Water tanker from Headquarters attended a house fire in East Cork during the thunder storm last night to assist our colleagues in @corkcountyfire with a water supply. #Cork #Fire pic.twitter.com/F8SyevhUt1
— Cork City Fire Brigade (@CorkCityFire) May 27, 2018
“From what I heard this morning in the village, the lightning strike was like an explosion on the roof,” a local man told The Irish Independent.
“It caused a lot of damage to the roof and that’s where they believe the fire started and then spread around the upper part of the house.”
