destroyed the\u00a0Marine Science Lab<\/a>\u00a0on the\u00a0University of South Florida St. Petersburg\u00a0campus was likely caused by a lightning strike during an intense thunderstorm that swept through the area Saturday, meteorologists said.<\/p>\nMeteorologists at the\u00a0National Weather Service\u00a0of\u00a0Tampa Bay\u00a0received three emails Saturday night from the\u00a0Florida State Emergency Operations Center\u00a0that said the fire was caused by a lightning strike.<\/p>\n
The first email was sent at\u00a06:22 p.m.<\/p>\n
It said that the \u201cSt. Pete Fire Department reports a structure fire involving the science building of USF being on fire due to a lightning strike,\u201d according to\u00a0Ross Giarratana, a meteorologist for the weather service\u2019s local office.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to say if that was the exact cause with 100% certainty,\u201d Giarratana said. \u201cThe key thing is that the lightning description (in the emails) remained the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
The\u00a0State Watch Office<\/a> sends out communications to agencies across the state to ensure all parties are aware of ongoing situations, according to its website. The emails include preliminary information provided by the responding agency and are not an official record of what happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexa CoultoffTampa Bay Times(TNS) The fire that\u00a0destroyed the\u00a0Marine Science Lab\u00a0on the\u00a0University of South Florida St. Petersburg\u00a0campus was likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-257945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}