For four days in August 1924, the Midwest was battered by violent storms that tore through Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana with cyclonic winds, pounding rain, hail, and lightning.
By the time the skies began to clear, communities were digging out from wreckage, crop losses were mounting into the millions, and the death toll continued to rise as reports came in over damaged telegraph wires.
Among the strangest and most tragic accounts was the death of two boys at South Bend, Indiana. They had been sitting on a steel plate while fishing when lightning struck, flashing across the metal in sheets of flame and killing them instantly.
Their deaths were only one part of a larger storm disaster filled with terrifying lightning strikes, freak accidents, and devastation across the region.
Boys Killed By Bolt While Fishing
CHICAGO, Illinois. — In the face of further rain and wind storms predicted for today, inhabitants in Wisonsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana districts that were smitten by cyclonic winds and deluges of rain for the past four days are striving courageously to dig themselves from the debris which strews these sections.
Latest reports filtering in over crippled wires today placed yesterday’s and Thursday night’s death list at nine. This total does not include six or eight deaths due to storms earlier in the week. Property damage in cities and towns in the path of the blow and to farm crops will run into the millions.
Early today a storm of terrific intensity, accompanied by hail and destructive lightning, cut a swath through Indiana.
Two were killed at Lafayette, two at South Bend, and one at Petersburg by lightning bolts. The first two had sought shelter under a steam shovel. Preceding a deafening aerial explosion, a bolt of lightning curled its way through the mechanism of the great shovel, ripped the mechanism apart and electrocuted the two men.
Eleven others were badly shocked. The two at South Bend were boys seated on a steel plate, fishing. Attracted by the metal, the lightning flared in freakish sheets of flame over the plate’s surface, instantly killing the boys.
There were many other freaks of the storm. Perhaps the weirdest of these was a lightning bolt in Oak Park, Illinois, which slithered down the trunk of a tree, followed the roots, and broke up through the pavement to a velocipede being ridden by three-year-old Lizette Benthim.
Source: The Washington Times. Washington, D.C. August 9, 1924.
