Of the 10 people struck by lightning, nine survive. What does the human body feel when lightning strikes it? We will learn this firsthand.
Sometimes they keep those clothes. Scraps or burnt scraps that for some reason were not thrown away by doctors and nurses when they brought themselves the victim of an unexpected blow from heaven.
They come back to this story again and again - they retell what happened to them many times in the family circle or in social networks, share photos and articles about other survivors like them after being struck by lightning.
Or about the real tragedies that such a hit led to.
Here is a video from Brazil, how lightning hits a tourist on the ocean coast. Here is an electrical discharge from the sky killing a Texan who went out for a morning run. Here is news from Bangladesh, where 65 people died in four days of continuous thunderstorms.
The picture of what happened to them is being restored piece by piece, gradually: from the stories of witnesses, pieces of burnt clothes and burns on the skin - all that was left behind by a 200,000,000-volt atmospheric discharge that fell from the sky at a rate of one-third the speed Sveta.
Something like this, members of the Jaime Santana family rebuilt what happened that Saturday in April 2016. To all of the above, you must add a straw hat, torn to shreds.
“He looked like a cannonball had flown through him,” recalls Sydney Weil, a trauma surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona, to whom an ambulance brought Haime to that day.
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While Santana was being rushed to the hospital, paramedics had to use a defibrillator several times to prevent Haima's heart from stopping.
Jaime Santana took a horse ride in the mountains with his brother-in-law and two other friends. On weekends, they did it often.
Suddenly dark clouds flew in, and the horsemen were going home. Lightning was already flashing in the sky against the background of the mountain peaks, but the rain did not start.
They were already almost near the house when it happened, says Alejandro Torres, Jaime's brother-in-law.
Alejandro believes that he was unconscious for a short time. When he came to, he found himself lying prone on the ground. The whole body ached terribly. His horse disappeared somewhere.
The other two riders were obviously shaken, but safe and sound. Alejandro looked around and saw Jaime next to the horse lying on the ground.
Approaching, he accidentally touched the legs of this horse - they were hardened, he recalls, as if they were made of metal.
He came closer to Haima: "I saw how he was smoking - that's when I got scared."
On Haime's chest, he saw flames. Three times Alejandro shot down the flames with his bare hands. And three times the fire came on again.
Strange, but only later, when a neighbor came to the rescue and an ambulance arrived, it dawned on them: lightning had hit Khaim.
White flash
Justin Goger would like his memories to be less vivid and vivid.
Then, perhaps, he would not have suffered for so long from post-traumatic syndrome and constant anxiety.
Lightning hit him when he was fishing for trout in a lake near Flagstaff, all in the same Arizona.
Even now, three years later, when lightning begins to flash in the sky, he feels most comfortable when he closes in the bathroom and watches with the help of a mobile application when the storm finally leaves.
An avid angler, Justin was at first delighted when it started raining that August day. In this weather, the fish bite better, he told Rachel's wife.
The storm began suddenly - as, in fact, happens here at this time in summer. The rain poured down more and more and finally turned into hail.
The wife and daughter took refuge in the car, and soon Justin's son joined them.
The hailstones were getting bigger, some were almost the size of a golf ball, and when they hit Justin, he really hurt.
In the end, he gave up. Covering himself with a folding chair with a cloth seat, he headed for the car. This chair, which was burnt on one side, is still kept by the Godgers.
Meanwhile, Rachel was filming from the front seat of the car, hoping to catch the moment when her husband would come running to escape the hail.
In the video, which Rachel recorded on her smartphone, at first everything is white on the screen, and hailstones hit the windshield. Then there is a bright flash. Rachel believes that this was the lightning bolt that hit her husband.
Thunderbolt. Pain that turns inside out.
“My body was completely paralyzed - I just couldn't move,” Justin recalls. - The pain was so … I just can't describe it. Well, maybe this: remember how once in childhood you accidentally got an electric shock - so, multiply that feeling by a billion and imagine this pain in the whole body."
“I saw a blinding white light surrounding my body - as if I were in a bubble. Everything slowed down. It seemed to me that I will now stay in this bubble forever."
Other man and woman, hiding from the weather under a tree, came running to help. Then they told Justin that he continued to grip the chair in his hands, and his whole body was smoking.
When Justin regained consciousness, his ears were ringing. Then it dawned on him that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Diagonal burns
Now, describing what happened that day, Justin shows how the burns are located on his back.
The lightning trail starts at the right shoulder and goes down diagonally, he says, and then extends out to the outside of both legs.
He brings to show the shoes he was in then. They also have burns. In some places, they burned through and through.
Justin believes that the lightning struck him in the shoulder, went through the body and out through the legs.
While survivors often point out where the lightning entered and where it left, it is difficult to say exactly which route it took to pierce a person, says Mary Ann Cooper, a Chicago doctor who has studied lightning for a long time and is now retired.
Every year lightning strikes more than 4 thousand lives around the world - this follows from the statistics of 26 countries. (The actual death toll from lightning remains to be seen when we start getting reliable statistics from developing countries - Central African in particular.)
Cooper is one of a relatively small number of professionals (doctors, meteorologists, electrical engineers, etc.) who are trying to better understand how lightning strikes people and how to avoid it.
Of every 10 people struck by lightning, nine survive and are ready to tell their story. However, these cases do not pass for them without consequences - both short-term and long-term.
The list of these consequences is long and frightening: cardiac arrest, fog in the head, seizures and seizures, dizziness, muscle pain, deafness, headaches, memory loss, loss of attention, changes in character, chronic pain …
Many of those who have experienced this are ready to share their experience of facing the cruel forces of nature.
They share their stories online and at the annual Lightning Strike & Electric Shock Survivors International conferences.
These people gather every spring in the mountains in the southeastern United States. Their meetings began in the early 1990s, when 13 people attended the first conference of lightning strike survivors.
In the days when the Internet did not exist, it was rather difficult to find those like you, those who, after a lightning strike, are alone trying to cope with headaches, blackouts, insomnia, says Steve Marshburn, the founder of the society.
Steve has been living with all of these symptoms since 1969 when he was struck by lightning while standing outside a bank.
He and his wife have been working on a voluntary basis for almost 30 years in this organization, in which there are already almost 2 thousand members.
Changes in character, mood changes experienced by survivors (sometimes with bouts of deep depression) sometimes lead families to the brink of disintegration.
Mary Ann Cooper gives her favorite analogy: lightning, she says, affects the human brain in much the same way that a short circuit affects your computer. Outwardly, nothing seems to have changed, but the software can no longer function as before.
Both Marshburn and Cooper appreciate Lightning Strike & Electric Shock Survivors International, which, according to Marshburn himself, has prevented at least 22 suicides.
Marshburn is quite accustomed to being called in the middle of the night, and he spends several hours talking to someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After such conversations, Marshburn feels devastated.
Cooper, who attended several meetings of these people, admits that she still does not fully understand what is happening to them. "But I listen, listen and listen to them."
Despite the fact that she is very sympathetic to the victims, some things in their stories cause her distrust.
Sometimes they claim that they feel the approach of a thunderstorm long before it starts. “It's possible,” Cooper admits, “their injury has given them increased sensitivity to the weather.”
However, she is more critical of stories about how computers freeze when one of those who once was hit by lightning enters the room. Or the fact that these people run out of batteries faster in gadgets.
After decades of study and observation, Cooper and other lightning experts readily admit that there are still more questions than answers.
For example, it is not clear why some people suffer from seizures after being struck by lightning. And does the blown impact on those health problems that arise with age?
Some of these people say they feel like medical nomads because they cannot find a doctor who understands at least something about the injuries sustained by lightning strikes.
Justin Godger, whose legs became mobile within five hours of being struck by lightning, is now suffering from PTSD. Plus, his brain isn't working as fast as it used to.
He does not understand how he can return to the work that he did before what happened to him (Justin worked as a lawyer).
“When I talk on the phone, the words in my head seem to be mixed up,” he says. - I begin to think about what exactly I want to say, and everything is completely confused with me. And when I finally say something, that's not exactly what I wanted to say."
Arc discharge effect
When lightning strikes someone, it happens so quickly that only a very small amount of electricity passes through the body. Most of it stays outside, creating what is called an arc effect, Cooper explains.
In comparison, contact with a high-voltage wire results in much more serious internal injuries, since the exposure to electricity can be longer, even if it is a matter of a few seconds - this is quite enough for your organs to be severely damaged.
Why do external burns happen? Cooper explains that they can occur from lightning contact with sweat on the skin or with raindrops.
Water expands in volume when it turns into steam, and even a small volume of it can lead to a so-called steam explosion.
“Clothes literally rip off with such an explosion,” says Cooper. Sometimes shoes.
The boots, however, are more likely to be ripped or damaged from the inside, because this is where the heat builds up.
When it comes to clothing, steam will interact with it in different ways, depending on what it is made of. For example, a leather jacket can trap steam inside, leading to skin burns.
The mobile phone that Jaime Santana had in his pocket melted and stuck in his pants.
How did Jaime survive? After all, his horse died.
One possible explanation, according to trauma surgeon Sidney Weil, is that it was the horse who took on the bulk of the lightning bolt that nearly killed its 31-year-old rider.
Or perhaps artificial respiration helped, which Jaime immediately began to do, a neighbor who ran up in time. He continued to do it until the paramedics arrived.
What is the probability of hitting?
The conventional wisdom is that the probability of being struck by lightning is one in a million. But this is only partly true.
If you look at the data for the United States for one year, everything seems to be correct. But these statistics are misleading, says Ron Hall, an American meteorologist with a long history of studying lightning.
He urges to look at other numbers. If someone is 80 years old, their vulnerability increases to 1 in 13,000 throughout their life.
Take into account the fact that each victim of lightning has relatives and friends who are affected by this tragedy in one way or another - thus the chance of being among those affected by a lightning strike increases even more - almost to 1 in 1300.
Hall does not like the word "strike" at all - in his opinion, this suggests that lightning strikes directly into the human body. In fact, such direct hits are extremely rare.
Hall, Cooper and several other prominent lightning researchers have recently jointly calculated that direct hits are responsible for no more than 3-5% of electrical shock injuries.
(True, Sidney Weil assumes that Jaime Santana was struck by a direct lightning strike, given that he was galloping through a desert area, where there was not a single tree or other tall object around.)
Justin Godger believes that he was hit by lightning that touched him tangentially, reflected from some other object - a tree or a telephone pole.
Reflected lightning is believed to be the cause of 20-30% of injuries or deaths from electrical shock.
As a rule, in high-income regions of the world, men are much more likely to die from lightning than women: two-thirds of cases of lightning strikes a person are the victim of a man.
This can be explained by the fact that men are more inclined to take risks, and their work is more often associated with the possibility of being struck by lightning, Hall notes.
Peacocks of arizona
… When Jaime was brought to the Phoenix trauma clinic, his heart was beating intermittently, he had a cerebral hemorrhage, lungs and other internal organs, including his liver, were damaged, says Dr. Weil.
Second and third degree burns covered nearly one fifth of his body. So that his body could recover, doctors injected Santana into an artificial coma for almost two weeks.
After five months of treatment and rehabilitation, Jaime returned home. “The hardest thing for me is that I can't walk,” he admits.
“The doctors say that some of Jaime's nerves are still not awake,” says Sarah, Jaime's sister. The family hopes that the timing and procedures of rehabilitation will fix this.
The day Sarah and Alejandro returned home from the hospital where they left Jaime struck by lightning, Alejandro went out to the backyard to call his wife. And suddenly he saw a peacock sitting on the fence of the horse paddock - a real peacock with a multi-colored tail.
Prior to that, Sarah and Alejandro had only seen peacocks in Arizona at the zoo.
They left that peacock with them and later found a mate for him. Now they have a whole family of peacocks.
When Sarah decided to see what this beautiful bird symbolized, she was amazed: renewal, resurrection, immortality.
Charlotte Huff