Last week their house was struck by lightning, leaving a large hole in a window.
The strike was one of 19 across Christchurch and Selwyn last Sunday, accompanied by heavy rain.
Julia was in the lounge scrolling on Facebook while Harry was in the bathroom getting ready for bed.
“I was just sitting there, then all hell broke loose outside. The flash was huge,” she said.
Said Harry: “It was like someone dropped a bomb.”
At first, Julia thought something electrical had gone wrong with the house on Tancreds Rd, Lincoln.
But with the power still on, she realised it was lightning.
“I think my husband was more frightened than me; I just didn’t know what the hell was going on,” she said.
Harry said it was “pretty frightening”, comparing it to the current conflict in the Middle East.
“With what’s going around the world at the moment, I thought holy s**t have they sent one over here? Because it was that loud – it was unbelievable,” he said.
The strike also spooked the family’s pets.
“The cat was outside, she came running in. The rottweiler wanted to go outside, the jack russell was just shaking,” Julia said.
Their second cat stayed asleep.
Julia sent a message to her family group chat, saying their house had been struck.
It was only when her daughter-in-law Tanya called to check if they were okay that they noticed the large hole in the window a couple of metres from where Julia had been sitting.
“It was just that much racket we didn’t hear it break, and the curtain stopped the glass,” she said.
Metservice meteorologist Lewis Ferris said several of the 19 strikes were cloud-to-ground, which are often louder than cloud-to-cloud strikes.
