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Michelle Wu wins historic Boston mayor’s race

Michelle Wu, the 36-year-old daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and a Boston Public
Schools mother who pitched a once parochial city on an unabashedly progressive agenda,
captured the Boston mayoralty by a wide margin on Tuesday, shattering barriers to mark
a new era in one of the nation’s most durable bastions of white male political power.

Wu declared victory Tuesday night as unofficial returns showed she had handily defeated
rival City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, who ran a more moderate and traditional
campaign. Wu united supporters in progressive enclaves and communities of color to earn
a decisive share of the vote.

Wu is not only the first woman and first person of color elected mayor, but at 36, also the
youngest in nearly a century. She will be the city’s first mayor in over a century who was
not born and raised in Boston...

Lightning strike causes tree to explode in Ashland MA

A crew boarded up damage to one of the Ashland Commons apartment buildings after a tree was hit by lightning and “exploded,”
damaging several apartments and parked vehicles during Saturday night’s storm


About eight to 10 people remained displaced from their homes in Ashland on Sunday after lightning struck a tree the previous evening, causing it to explode and damage nearby buildings and cars, officials said.

The tree was struck outside of Ashland Commons apartment complex on Presidents Row as a powerful storm knocked down trees and caused power outages across the region Saturday evening.

As of about 8:50 p.m. Saturday, nearly 8,700 customers were without power in Massachusetts, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. By Sunday afternoon, that number had dropped to about two dozen, the agency reported.

Theresa Zimmerley said she was sitting by a window in her Ashland Commons home at around 6 p.m. when she heard thunder rolling in the distance. Then, out of nowhere, she heard a loud crack of thunder nearby followed by what sounded like an explosion.

“It was nothing I have ever heard before,” Zimmerley, 62, said in a telephone interview Sunday. “It actually hurt my ear.”

Her clock, pictures, and other items hanging on the walls fell off, Zimmerley said. “It sounded and looked like a bomb went off,” she said.

The lightning had struck a large pine tree, which “exploded into pieces doing damage to three residential apartment buildings and multiple vehicles in [the] parking lot,” Ashland Fire Chief Keith Robie wrote in an e-mail Saturday night.

“Miraculously, there were no injuries,” the Ashland Fire Department tweeted.

For the second time in as many months, a mysterious boom has jolted residents in a small group of New England towns, this time in eastern and central Massachusetts, setting off a firestorm of speculation in community social media groups as to the cause of the noise.

Like with the last perplexing and jarring sound to shake this region, the clues are minimal.

Just after 10 p.m. Wednesday, residents of Stow and surrounding towns were unsettled by a sudden, deep-toned boom that rattled the walls and floors of their homes.

“All of a sudden I head this boom, I mean it was very loud, and I looked at my husband and said what the [expletive] was that,’’ said Lisa Marie Boyce, who lives in Maynard. “I was scared; it sounded like an explosion. We just had a house explode in Maynard a couple of months ago, so obviously that was my first inkling of what was going on.’’

As of late Thursday afternoon, 184 people had reported hearing the boom on an unofficial website that documents earthquakes and seismic activity.

Local police departments — in what appears to be a 20-mile radius in the area of Maynard, Stow, Acton, Ayer, Sudbury, and Bolton — investigated the noise after some were flooded with concerned reports about the noise. They turned up nothing.

“We have absolutely no idea what it is,’’ said a dispatcher at the Stow Police Department, which wrote on Facebook Wednesday night that officers were investigating the reports.

A firm explanation for the noise, described by some residents as the sound of an explosion or of a massive tree crashing to the ground, has yet to surface.

Joel Richman, who lives in Boxborough, was sitting in his downstairs office finishing up work for the night when the boom reverberated through his home, shaking the wire-strung photos on his walls and alarming his dog.

“The same pitch as thunder, but it starts with a really big rumble,’’ he recalled in a phone interview. “This was like a detonation and then it kept rumbling for another second or two. Like when a tank cannon goes off.’’

Hypotheses by residents are wide-ranging: a meteorite exploded in the atmosphere, a local earthquake, residual effects from an earthquake in Missouri, military fighter jets, demolitions at a local military base. The list goes on.

But most of those theories were dispelled by scientific agencies on Thursday.

A scientist at the US Geological Survey’s Earthquake Information Center said the agency had detected no seismic activity in the area Wednesday night. Their detecting equipment is very sensitive, he said, it couldn’t have been an earthquake.

Alan Dunham, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Norton office had no clues either.

“We have no official reports about what was causing the loud booming in that area,’’ he said. “People thought it might’ve been an earthquake, but we’ve had no official notification of that. Really, I’ve got nothing for you.’’

He said no major weather systems were passing through the area at the time, indicating that thunder was an unlikely possibility.

What few clues exist are remarkably similar to those of a similar incident last month in New Hampshire: a booming noise, no seismic activity detected, and no storms in the area.

In that instance, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Weather Service, and other experts said the noise was likely the result of a bolide, or meteor, entering the atmosphere.

Residents have wondered aloud if a meteor from the ongoing Leonid meteor shower broke into the Earth’s atmosphere above the region and exploded Wednesday, causing the noise.

Could that be what happened in these rural towns? Security footage from a home in Bolton that was shared on social media shows a bright flash briefly illuminating the cloudy sky shortly after 10 p.m. About 20 seconds later, a deep boom cracks through the night.

Meers Oppenheim, a professor of astronomy at Boston University, isn’t convinced.

The Leonid shower, he said, is comprised of low-density rocks from Comet Tempel-Tuttle that typically disintegrate in the atmosphere. However, asteroidal material can make it through the atmosphere and potentially generate a boom.

“Are we more likely to have a fireball during these showers that gets all the way to the Earth? Maybe a little,’’ he said. “The biggest objects can in fact make a sonic boom. But it takes a big object, not like one of these meteors.’’

He also says the timing of the boom, just 20 seconds after the flash of light was captured on video, further serves to dispel the theory. Those 20 seconds mean the source of the boom was about four miles from where the video was taken, he said, and bigger chunks of space material almost never implode that close to the planet’s surface.

“Usually they’re coming from 60 miles above the surface,’’ Oppenheim said. “That sounds more like lightning to me, something that’s within [four] miles of the observer.’’