![]() ![]() “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. “My whole body was just stopped – I couldn’t move any more,” Justin recalls. Then a flash flickers across the screen, the only one that Rachel saw that day, the one that she believes felled her husband.Ī crashing boom. Initially all that’s visible on the screen is white, a blur of hail hitting the windshield. Rachel was filming the storm from the front seat, planning to catch her husband streaking back as the hail intensified. Giving up, he grabbed a nearby folding canvas chair – the charring on one corner is still visible today – and turned to head for the truck. The pellets grew larger, approaching golf ball size, and really started to hurt as they pounded Justin’s head and body. Fish are more likely to bite when it’s raining, he told his wife, Rachel.īut as the rain picked up, becoming stronger and then turning into hail, his wife and daughter headed for the truck, followed later by his son. The storm had kicked up suddenly, as they often do during the summer monsoon season. ![]() Even now, some three years later, when a storm moves in, the flickering flashes of light approaching, he’s most comfortable sitting in his bathroom closet, monitoring its progress with an app on his phone.Īn avid fisherman, Justin had initially been elated when the rain started that August afternoon. If it weren’t, he wonders, perhaps the anxiety and lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder wouldn’t have trailed him for so long. Justin Gauger wishes his memory of when he was struck – while fishing for trout at a lake near Flagstaff, Arizona – wasn’t so vivid. It wasn’t until later, after a neighbor had come running from a distant property to help and the paramedics had arrived, that they began to realize what had happened – Jaime had been struck by lightning. Three times Alejandro beat out the flames with his hands. He reached Jaime: “I see smoke coming up – that’s when I got scared.” Flames were coming off of Jaime’s chest. They felt hard, like metal, he says, punctuating his English with some Spanish. 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 several hundred feet from the back of the property.Īlejandro doesn’t think he was knocked out for long. 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. In the distance, the desert mountains rise, rippled chocolate-brown peaks against the horizon. He paces out the area involved, the landscape dotted with small creosote bushes just behind his acre of property. They had nearly reached the house when it happened, says Alejandro Torres, Jaime’s brother-in-law. Dark clouds had formed, heading in their direction, so the group had started back. ![]() Jaime had been horse-riding with his brother-in-law and two others in the mountains behind his brother-in-law’s home outside Phoenix, a frequent weekend pastime. “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 having been shocked several times along the way as paramedics struggled to stabilize its rhythm. In this way, Jaime Santana’s family have stitched together some of what happened that Saturday afternoon in April 2016, through his injuries, burnt clothing and, most of all, his shredded broad-brimmed straw hat. #Rebaslight lightning effect skinOnly 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. The 65 people killed during four stormy days in Bangladesh. The video of a tourist hit on a Brazilian beach or the Texan struck dead while out running. 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. Sometimes they’ll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren’t cut away and discarded by the doctors and nurses. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |