I recall standing about 40 feet away from one lonely tree in the center of a block of land in a tiny town on the Queensland border in Australia. I was doing a TV News interview at the time and holding a Metal microphone attached to a large tripod and camera. I'm positive I felt it coming, I noticed the hairs on the back of my neck standing up seconds before it hit. That poor tree caught a direct hit and exploded as if a bomb had been planted inside it. Massive branches were thrown not far from where we were standing. I remember feeling as if something had given me a powerful punch to my body and every hair on my body tingled. It's hard to explain but obviously the explosion was the sap inside the tree suddenly expanding and blowing the tree apart. The person I was interviewing had his back to the tree, but unfortunately the camera had it out of shot because I wanted grain silos in the background. Normally I would have been closer to the tree to have it in shot to break up the background.
Lucky we weren't closer, but I do wish I'd had the tree in shot. On reviewing the tape we could see the bright flash, the AGC didn't have time to close down, but I got shots of the tree in pieces and smoke pouring out of it. That night it led the news and the real story was shown the following day. By the way, there was no rain before or after, and just as well, if the ground had been wet, I think we would have felt it a little too much.