It wasn’t until later, after a neighbor had come running to help and the paramedics had arrived, that they began to realize what had happened – Jaime had been struck by lightning.Ī bicyclist rides along a flooded street as a powerful storm moves across Southern California on Februin Sun Valley, California. ![]() Three times Alejandro beat out the flames with his hands. They felt hard, like metal, he says.Īlejandro reached Jaime: “I see smoke coming up – that’s when I got scared.” Flames were coming off of Jaime’s chest. Alejandro brushed against the horse’s legs as he walked passed. Alejandro went looking for Jaime, who he found on the other side of his fallen horse. The two other riders appeared shaken but unharmed. When he regained consciousness, he was lying face down on the ground, sore all over. But scarcely a drop of rain had fallen as they approached the horse corrals, just a few hundred feet from the back of the property.Īlejandro doesn’t think he was knocked out for long. They 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. Jaime had been horse-riding with Alejandro Torres – his brother-in-law – and two others in the mountains behind Alejandro’s home outside Phoenix, Arizona, a frequent weekend pastime. In this way, Jaime Santana’s family have stitched together some of what happened that Saturday afternoon in April 2016. 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. They’ll tell and retell their story, sharing pictures and news reports of survivals like their own or far bigger tragedies. Sometimes they’ll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren’t cut away and discarded by the doctors and nurses. Victims can suffer short and long-term effects, such as cardiac arrest, confusion, seizures (2015).Lightning is responsible for more than 4,000 deaths worldwide annually ![]()
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