Out in Tusquittee, nestled just off of Tusquittee Road, lies Three Bars Farm.
Three Bars Farm, run by Alaina Brooks, is a horse farm that is dedicated to breeding, developing and training top of the line horses for competitive and passionate riders. Though sadly on Thursday, July 2 tragedy struck, quite literally. The usually serene farm was rattled by a bolt of lightning that not only struck a building, but also cost the lives of two horses.
Luckily, I was able to secure an interview with Brooks so that I could hear the full story of what happened. This particular Thursday all was normal except for the fact that the Bar W Rodeo at Cutworms Coral — situated directly next to Three Bars Farm — had already been put up and was set to begin later that evening.
The horses at Three Bars were turned out as usual, which means they were put out into their fields for the night. The pastures that some of the horses are kept in are wide open, flat spaces with no trees which means that there truly weren’t many conductors nearby. If lightning were to strike it would strike Cutworms Coral with all of the medal piping, tall lights and bleachers set up for the rodeo, right? Additionally, as Brooks stated, “there was no rain, there was no storm,” which makes the following events even more shocking.
On Thursday night at around 6 or 6:30 p.m. — less than an hour before the rodeo was set to begin — a bolt of lightning struck one of the pastures just as one of Brooks' employees happened to be walking down the farms' gravel driveway. Though the employee was thrown to the ground by the power of the lightning, she was thankfully OK, sadly the same could not be said for two of the horses in the pasture. One of the horses got a “direct hit” from the lightning whereas the other horse got a secondary strike from the building that had also been struck. Lucky enough for the other horses in the surrounding area, the building wasn’t completely destroyed and didn’t catch on fire.
When talking with Brooks about the dead horses she said that it is always very traumatic for all involved when you go to retrieve something from such a terrible accident. When describing the two horses after the lightning strike, she said that you could see where the lightning had traveled on the horses’ bodies and that it disturbed their hair while also slightly burning them where the lightning had struck. This is a deeply distressing event that was a one in a million chance, but sadly for those two horses, they were the statistical anomaly.