MEXICO — Peter and Mabel Merrill’s house and barn at 285 Roxbury Road were ground zero for lightning strikes Tuesday morning.

Shock waves of instantaneous thunder were deafening from three big blasts that superheated the air around the 200- to 250-year-old house and barn topped with lightning rods, Peter Merrill said.

“It was pretty frickin’ hot,” he said. “We took three major lightning bolts here this morning.”

Merrill said his wife and son were standing on the porch waiting for the school bus and saw one bolt hit the road between their house and Mexico fire Chief Gary Wentzell’s auto body shop just down the road.

The other two bolts hit behind the house and barn.

Then, a few minutes later, a car pulled up, its driver got out and asked them to call the Fire Department, because he saw smoke rising from a building.

One lightning bolt is believed to have bounced from the Merrill place and into the rear garage wall of Casey’s Auto next door at 297 Roxbury Road, also called Route 17, state fire investigator Dan Young said at the scene.

It ignited the wall, starting a smoldering fire packing intense heat and thick black smoke that caused an estimated $100,000 in damage to the garage, Young and Wentzell said.

Owner Dan Casey, 85, said the fire destroyed 97 percent of the inside of his garage, including a 2000 Jeep Cherokee that was hoisted up on a lift to have its engine replaced. He estimated damage to the Jeep at $5,000. The building was insured.

Young said the lightning bolt hit a nail in wood at the rear wall.

Where “the nail that goes into the stud — it’s all scalloped out and the nail had tremendous heat. It’s melted. You wouldn’t get that type of damage in a normal fire.”

The heat was so intense it even melted window panes in doors, Wentzell said.

“The lightning, oh, it was terrible,” Casey said. “It was hitting all over the frickin’ place.”

Prior to the fire, Casey went to Rumford Hospital for a blood work appointment, and then his phone rang. It was his employee, Joe Patneaude of Roxbury, the owner of the destroyed Jeep.

Patneaude, also a volunteer Roxbury firefighter, said he told his boss not to panic, that the garage was on fire and he was headed to it and everything would be OK.

Automatic mutual-aid firefighters from Mexico, Rumford, Peru, Dixfield and Roxbury responded to the fire, while Andover firefighters manned Rumford’s fire station.

Wentzell said there was very little fire, but intense smoke and heat.

“When we come out, there was smoke coming out everywhere, and it was right after we had three or four really big lightning strikes right here,” he said.

“The smoke was so black that when they opened this (side) door up, they thought that (Jeep) was a wall. They couldn’t even tell.”

Firefighters quickly vented the building to let the heat and smoke out and extinguished the fire.

After pinpointing its origin, Young and Wentzell investigated further at the Merrill barn and house. They found soot on the side of his house and shingles blown off the barn roof.

Peter Merrill said they both called, telling him when he returned home from work to check for damage.

“They can’t say lightning doesn’t hit the same spot twice, because (Tuesday’s) the third frickin’ time it’s hit right in that spot in two years,” Merrill said.

Last year, a lightning bolt struck and blew apart trees behind his barn, between his place and the town garage, he said.

“Two years ago, lightning blew everything in my backyard up,” Merrill said.

“It blew four trees all to smithereens. It was poplar trees and they just exploded.

“My whole backyard, it looked like someone had taken a rototiller over the whole back lawn. It was enough to scare me,” he said.

“At first, I thought it was just one in a million, but when you get two or three of them, especially three of them in one storm that close, that’s kind of strange.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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