Some things you want to experience for yourself, and other things are best experienced via a third party.

A lightning strike definitely falls into the latter category, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to come away from such an incident unaffected then you’re among the more fortunate.

MosaicScience have interviewed a number of survivors, and open their article as follows:

Sometimes they’ll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren’t cut away and discarded by the doctors and nurses. They’ll tell and retell their story at family gatherings and online, sharing pictures and news reports of survivals like their own or far bigger tragedies…

Only by piecing together the bystander reports, the singed clothing and the burnt skin can survivors start to 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.

First up is Jaime Santana, struck in Phoenix, Arizona, who has very little recollection of what happened:

Jaime had been horse-riding with his brother-in-law and two others in the mountains…Dark clouds had formed, heading in their direction, so the group had started back…

The riders had witnessed 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, just 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, who he found on the other side of his fallen horse…

That above is Jaime’s underwear, by the way.

He reached Jaime: “I see smoke coming up – that’s when I got scared.” Flames were coming off of 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, struck while fishing for trout in Arizona, has a better recollection of the moment following the strike:

A crashing boom. A jolting, excruciating pain. “My whole body was just stopped – I couldn’t move any more,” Justin recalls. “The pain was… I can’t explain the pain except to say if you’ve ever put your finger in a light socket as a kid, multiply that feeling by a gazillion throughout your entire body.

“And I saw a white light surrounding my body – it was like I was in a bubble. Everything was slow motion. I felt like I was in a bubble for ever.”

Justin’s socks below:

An estimated 4 000 people die globally from lightning strikes every year, although that number could well be far higher due to being under-reported. Whilst nine out of 10 people struck will survive, there are still many side effects:

The list is lengthy and daunting: cardiac arrest, confusion, seizures, dizziness, muscle aches, deafness, headaches, memory deficits, distractibility, personality changes and chronic pain, among others.

We’ll end with the maths of it all:

The popular perception is that the chance of being struck by lightning is one in a million. There’s some truth here, based on US data, if one only looks at deaths and injuries in a single year. But [US meteorologist and long-time lightning researcher Ron] Holle, who believes that statistic is misleading, set out to crunch some other numbers.

If someone lives until 80, their lifetime vulnerability increases to 1 in 13,000. Then consider that every victim knows at least ten people well, such as the friends and family of Jaime and Justin. Thus, any individual’s lifetime probability of being personally affected by a lightning strike is even higher, a 1 in 1,300 chance.

Let’s hope you’re never amongst the 1 300 people who are personally affected.

[source:mscience]