A lightning strike set trees on fire along Southwest Second Terrace in Cape Coral during Sunday's storm, and the fire department has confirmed the cause while publishing no incident release of its own

Trees along Southwest Second Terrace in Cape Coral caught fire on Sunday after being struck by lightning during a storm that brought heavy rain and, by one neighbor's account, lightning loud enough to set car alarms going down the street.

The Cape Coral Fire Department confirmed to Gulf Coast News that the trees were struck by lightning. A neighbor recorded video of the burning trees with smoke rising off them.

Marla Oyer, who lives in Cape Coral, told the newsroom she heard crews arriving. "Sirens going off...I mean we heard them all day," she said. Describing the storm itself rather than the fire, she added that it was "so bad, and it was really loud. I had to cover my ears because they were ringing. It was so loud. Then all of a sudden car alarms were just going off all down the street."

What has not been said

No public incident release exists for this fire.

The Cape Coral Fire Department publishes no incident feed. Its own site carries recruitment, inspection and fire prevention material and nothing about Sunday, and the city news list carries nothing on it either. That means the department's confirmation reaches the public through the newsroom that asked for it, and this item rests on that reporting, credited and linked above, rather than on a document.

Several things follow from that, and they are worth stating rather than glossing. The department has not given a time of day, a block number, a cross street or a count of trees. It has not said whether any structure was threatened. No injury has been reported and no damaged home has been reported, and neither of those is the same as the department saying that nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, because the department has not said anything at all.

The wider picture is quiet

There is no active weather alert for Lee County this morning.

The only National Weather Service alert live anywhere in Southwest Florida is a heat advisory covering coastal and inland Collier County, issued at 2.38 this morning and running until 6 this evening. It does not reach Cape Coral, and this site has covered it separately. There is no flood advisory, no severe thunderstorm warning and no storm alert of any kind standing over Lee County, so Sunday's system has left nothing behind it in the forecast.

The Florida Highway Patrol dispatch board was carrying 34 incidents statewide when it was read this morning and none of them in Lee or Collier. That board covers state roads. Southwest Second Terrace is a residential city street and would not appear on it under any circumstances, so its silence says nothing about this street one way or the other.

Why a tree strike is worth a paragraph

Lightning is the ordinary background hazard of a Southwest Florida August, and the version of it that reaches most people is not a strike on the house.

It is a strike on something near the house. A tall tree, particularly a dead or hollow one, takes the charge, the moisture inside it flashes to steam, and what is left is either an explosion of wood or a fire in the canopy a short distance from a roofline. That is the scenario the Cape Coral Fire Department responded to on Sunday, and it resolved without anything worse being reported.

For anyone whose trees took a hit in the same storm, the useful window is now rather than during the next one. Scorching, a fresh split, bark shed in sheets, or a canopy that browns off over the coming fortnight are all signs worth having looked at by someone qualified, because a damaged tree close to a structure is a problem that gets more expensive the longer it stands.