A doorbell camera caught the moment a huge loud bang woke people in Merthyr in the early hours of Sunday morning - October 16.
Merthyr Tydfil man Brian Evans was woken at about 1.30am, along with many others in the town, according to comments on social media. Brian, a retired engineer who lives in Pant, thought the noise came from building work at his property.
"It woke me out of bed, I went outside to the garden to look around, I thought it was something from the building work that is being done on my house," said the 58-year-old. It wasn't until the next morning, when his daughter asked him if he heard the thunder, that he realised what the sound was. You can read more stories about Merthyr Tydfil here.
"It wasn't like that usual sound you hear with thunder, it was a loud bang, you didn't have that usual rumble that comes with it," he explained. Brian put this down to how close the thunder must have been to his house - after checking his doorbell camera, he was able to work out just how close the lightning struck by measuring the time between the light, which you see first, and the loud clap that followed.
The short clip shows a quick light flash at 1.32 am - at 38 seconds - the thunder clap follows four seconds later.
"It's astonishing!" he said, "It must have hit somewhere near the Brecon Railway which is about three quarters of a mile away, and from the shadow it made on the back of my house, I could work out that it was to the north. It must have been so close which was why it sounds so shocking.
"I've captured all sorts on that camera, foxes, cats, but not lightning like this."
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