By John Leggett-The Courier-Herald

The Fourth of July came one day early for a South Prairie couple when a lightening bolt struck and blew up a 110-foot tall hemlock tree in their back yard. The blast jolted both of them out of bed from a sound sleep.

“It was about 1 a.m. on the third of July, when my husband and I heard this loud crackling boom and the lightening illuminated our entire bedroom as though bright sunlight was beaming through the window,” Geanellen Kuranko said.

“Well, I let out a bloodcurdling scream because the sound nearly scared me half to death and my husband Jerry's first concern was whether or not I was going to be okay,” she said. “It took us a while, but we were both eventually able to calm down and get back to sleep. Neither of us suspected that anything of such a cataclysmic nature had happened.

“When I got up the next morning for my usual coffee walk, I looked about 200 feet ahead of me and thought, whoa. That tree is about half the size that it was yesterday.”

Kuranko said the tree was blown to pieces. She said there were about 2,000 splinters, chunks and massive pieces of wood and bark strewn all over, but none of them were charred, burned or blackened.

“It was as if someone had set a charge of dynamite in the center of the tree and pushed down on the plunger. The power of nature is an amazing thing,” Jerry Kuranko said.

“That next day we were examining the perimeter of the explosion and we found a 8-foot long slab of wood the size and shape of a surfboard stuck in the ground 100 feet away from where the tree was,” he continued.

The couple said they have not moved a twig for insurance purposes. Pieces of the tree fell on a nearby shed.

They said close to 100 people have come out to see what's left of the tree.

John Leggett can be reached at jleggett@courierherald.com.