On July 28, 1995, Joe Stear was working in the back of his welding shop, Kuna Machine Shop, on Kuna’s Main Street, when he saw a lightning strike in the middle of the desert south of town.
Then he saw a puff of smoke rise up into the hot early evening sky.
“And I thought, ‘Well, I’d better get the shop locked up, so I can get out there,’” Stear, who was then a captain with the Kuna Rural Fire District, told me in an interview at Kuna City Hall, where he’s now the city’s mayor…