Oregon Man Struck by Lightning: Active Weather Day Also Produced Funnel Cloud

Published 06/27/26 at 8:55 p.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Portland, Oregon) - An especially active weather day yielded some near-deadly result in northwest Oregon. Photo Norman Hagestedt / Oregon Coast Beach Connection: part of the weather system south of Portland that produced these incidents. Hagestedt reports lightning was direclty overhead in the extremely dark area up ahead in the photo.

Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue (TVFR) reports it responded to the call of a golfer struck by lightning on Saturday afternoon a little before 3 p.m., during the day's sizable stretch of thunderstorms.

The man was on the course at Oregon Golf Club in West Linn, on Pete's Mountain Road.

TVFR said he was able to regain consciousness and then taken to a burn center in Portland, where he is expected to recover.

First responders say he told them he was golfing on the green by himself. He said he was in his cart at the time as storms really kicked in and he apparently remembers being hit by lightning. He was knocked out, and after awakening he called for help.

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The storm produced dozens of lightning strikes in the Portland / Metro area, mostly just to the east and south, especially around Tualatin and West Linn.

Oregon Coast Beach Connection received reports of it being directly overhead along I-5 just south of Portland. Norman Hagestedt, a relative of an Oregon Coast Beach Connection employee, snapped this shot on I-5 around the time the incident happened.

NOAA's GOES 18 satellite also caught numerous lightning strickes around Oregon and Washington. Some started at 4:30 a.m., but NOAA caught dozens more from about noon until 4 p.m. One part of this stretch is displayed in the video here.

Some of the heaviest storm action hit the Molalla area, where a funnel cloud was seen above the town. That event triggered the National Weather Service (NWS) to issue a funnel cloud alert for the Molalla area and parts of Clackamas County. It was only in effect briefly. See the beginnings of the funnel cloud (more than one was spotted by experts).

Hagestedt told Oregon Coast Beach Connection he was a little bit south of Wilsonville when he took this (4:27 p.m.), showing a foreboding sky that later turned out to be full of lightning and other hazards.

“It was dry where I was but the sky was, just really, really dark to the north,” he said. “Even darker than that picture showed. By the time I got up to north of Wilsonville there was lightning above, lightning in front and rain pouring down like I haven't seen in a long time. There was at least an inch on the road and it slowed the freeway down to about 15 mph.”

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