Holton, Indiana (Sep 1, 2016)--At 6-years-old Christopher Edwards was at the Danville Fair, leaning on a nail on the main post of a horse barn. Suddenly, lightning struck the building, flinging Edwards a few feet across the barn and leaving his arm different shades of purple.
"It kinda sparked my interest; I guess you could say," joked Edwards, a DePauw Facilities Management employee.
After being struck by lightning, Edwards began to teach himself meteorology. "I read everything I could get my hands on," he said. After a bit of self-teaching, the National Weather Service (NWS), a government institution with a primary task of providing warning signs in time of severe weather, began to educate Edwards more on how to analyze weather conditions.