When Lightning Strikes

There's a nine in ten chance you’ll survive. But what are the lasting effects of being exposed to hundreds of millions of volts of electricity?

- Charlotte Huff

Sometimes they’ll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren’t cut away by the doctors and nurses. They’ll tell their story, sharing pictures and news reports of survivals like their own or bigger tragedies. Only by piecing together bystander reports can survivors of lightning strikes construct their own picture of the possible trajectory of the electrical current, one that can approach 200 million volts and travel at one-third of the speed of light.

In this way, Jaime Santana’s family stitched together some of what happened one Saturday afternoon in April 2016, through his injuries, burnt clothing and, most of all, his shredded broad-brimmed straw hat. “It looks like somebody threw a cannonball through it,” says Sydney Vail, a trauma surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona, who saw Jaime after he arrived by ambulance.

Jaime had been horse riding with his brother-in-law, Alejandro Torres, and two others in the mountains when dark clouds formed and began heading in their direction. So, the group started back, witnessing quite a bit of lightning as they neared Alejandro’s house. But scarcely a drop of rain had fallen.

They had almost reached the house when it happened.

Alejandro doesn’t think he was knocked out for long. When he regained consciousness, he was lying face down on the ground, sore all over. His horse was gone. The two other riders appeared shaken but unharmed.

Alejandro found Jaime on the other side of his fallen horse. The horse’s legs felt hard, “like metal”, he says. Flames were coming offJaime’s chest. Three times Alejandro beat out the flames with his hands. Three times they reignited.

Jaime had been struck.