On Thursday evening, eight teenage boys were injured – two of whom are still being treated for very serious injuries – after a lightning strike on Lidingö. Young people were practicing football when they were surprised by a downpour and took shelter from the rain under some trees.
13-year-old Léon trained on the same field during the evening.
– It started to drizzle and thunder a bit. The lightning was still quite far away at the beginning, but then it started to rain more and it started to thunder more. Then I started to get scared, he says.
Lightning struck
The closer the thunder came, the more anxious Léon felt. When the practice was over, the rain poured down.
– Then we heard the worst crash. Then I was terrified, he says.
Léon tells how the players crowded into the coach’s car to escape the storm. From the car they could see the guys who had taken shelter under the trees.
When the lightning struck, Léon estimates that they were a maximum of 50 meters away.
What did you think when you heard that the guys under the tree had been hit?
– I panicked. I have never been so scared in my entire life. It was really disgusting. I was afraid for my mother, my friends and myself. When I woke up this morning I wasn’t as scared, but I feel very sorry for those who are in hospital, says Léon.
The windows rattled
Leon’s mother Charlotte was at the parent-teacher conference when the storm hit. She tells of the horror when she failed to get hold of Léon.
– I have never experienced a worse storm and it was so terrible that I couldn’t get hold of my child. We were both very upset, she says.
She describes how the windows rattled from the impact.
– It felt like you were in the middle of a war because the weather was nice and then it came so quickly.
At least 100 flashes of lightning on Lidingö
According to SMHI, at least 100 lightning strikes on Lidingö within the space of just under an hour. In the Stockholm area, there have been around 900 lightning strikes.
But the thunderstorm had slipped under the radar of meteorologists and no warning had been issued.
– Weather models often find it difficult to capture thunderstorms. In this case, there were warnings issued further west for thunderstorms but none over the Stockholm area where it hit, says SVT’s meteorologist Marcus Sjöstedt.