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Monroe, Ohio
A six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ with his arms raised along a highway was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm Monday night and burned to the ground, police said.
The “King of Kings” statue, one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.
The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m., Monroe police dispatchers said.
IN PICTURES: Ohio’s ‘Touchdown Jesus’ statue
The sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way his arms were raised, as though reaching out to catch a football. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained early Tuesday.
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Note to bible-thumpers : foam and plastic does not do respond well to lightning as the discharge of lightning can reach 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit ( that’s 30,000 degrees Celsius for all you metric people out there.) As the big Jesus had a steel core, the good folks in Ohio found out about Ohm’s law the hard way. One more time with feeling; electricity follows the path of least resistance. A 62 foot tall structure made of steel is an EXCELLENT path to ground for an electrical discharge.
