How It Feels To Be Struck By Lightning

More than 4,000 people are killed by lightning strikes every year, and many more are injured. Charlotte Huff met some of the survivors, and the scientists trying to better understand this natural phenomenon

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 Jaime Santana’s family have stitched together some of what happened to him one afternoon in April 2016 through his injuries, his 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 helped care for Jaime after he arrived by ambulance. His heart had been shocked several times along the way as paramedics battled to stabilise its rhythm. Jaime had been horse riding with his brother-in-law, Alejandro Torres, and two others in the mountains outside Phoenix, a favourite weekend pastime. Dark clouds had formed, heading in their direction, so the group had started back. They had seen quite a bit of lightning as they neared Alejandro’s house, enough that they had commented on the dramatic zigzags across the sky. But scarcely a drop of rain had fallen as they approached the horse corrals, several hundred feet from the back of the property. 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 went looking for Jaime, whom he found on the other side of his fallen horse. Alejandro brushed against the horse’s legs as he walked passed. They felt hard, like metal, he says, punctuating his English with some Spanish. He reached Jaime: “I see smoke coming up – that’s when I got scared.” Flames were coming off Jaime’s chest. Three times Alejandro beat out the flames with his hands. Three times they reignited. It wasn’t until later, after a neighbour had come running from a distant property to help and the paramedics had arrived, that they began to realise what had happened – Jaime had been struck by lightning. Justin Gauger wishes his memory of when he was struck – while fishing for trout at a