Local

Bellingham mother survives lightning strike inside her home office

BELLINGHAM, Mass. — A Bellingham woman is recovering tonight after getting struck by lightning while inside her own home.

“I’m just happy to be alive and happy to be coming home to my children tonight because it could’ve gone a different way. I’m in a lot of pain I’m very tired I’m having trouble seeing but I’m here and I get to see my children,” said Shelby Klopf.

Firefighters called this a freak situation since 23-year-old Klopf was not doing anything dangerous, just working in her home office.

“I touched the lamp to turn it on and all of a sudden I felt a huge boom saw an extremely bright white light that has now affected my vision and I flew back,” she said.

“What do you do? You touch a light at that exact time,” said her mother-in-law Renee Rovedo. “What can you do?”

Rovedo helped her out of the car and then into the home to see her children. But for two minutes, Klopf, forced to lean on the car just to stand up, spoke to Boston 25.

“My boys were outside 10 minutes prior to this happening to me so they went inside and glad it was me and not them,” said Klopf.

Medics rushed her to the hospital, but the scare still wasn’t over.

“They got her on a bunch of muscle relaxers and apparently when she got to the hospital, she had a seizure,” said Rovedo.

“Spasms in my hands and feet and I couldn’t move at all,” Klopf said. “I do have some memory loss from the entire ordeal so I’m just going off of what I’ve been told.”

However, for her two young children, they have a complete memory of the terrifying ordeal.

“I’m going to go see my children because they are extremely freaked out from what they saw and let them know that their mom is okay,” said Klopf.

The town dispatch says when the storm came in around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, it was not strong enough to knock any trees down, but there were a couple of telephone poles hit.

But this family is used to lightening. Sadly this was the most dangerous incident since it resulted in an injury but there were a couple of other incidents including in 2002 when the family says lightning caused a small house fire.

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