A man from Bowen Island, British Columbia, Canada was struck by lightning one August evening, blowing his rubber Crocs away from his feet last August 17.
Cal Misener, 50 years old, recalled being awakened by a thunderstorm at his Bowen Island residence. Remembering he left his truck windows down, he slipped on his pair of camouflage Crocs and went out.
Blown Almost Ten Feet Away
"I reached in to turn on the ignition, and just as I had done that, bam!" Misener told local news outlet CTV News. The 50-year-old man continued that there was no warning, with "the thunder and lightning hit at the very same time."
Misener thinks either he or his truck was hit by lightning that night. "The feeling is like this intensity that I've never felt before...my legs just felt like they had been blown apart," Misener said, adding that he saw the underside of his truck and the road turn into a "bright orange" color. When he came to, he was three meters, or almost ten feet, from his Ford, and the Crocs were off his feet.
"He was really struggling to get up," Misener's wife told the reporters. "I got him into the bedroom, put ice packs on his legs because they were just hot and buzzing."
Paramedics later checked Misener's vitals a couple of times, noting elevated blood pressure and heart rate but exhibiting no injuries. Responding personnel even encouraged him to go to the hospital. However, the 50-year-old Canadian declined the offer, feeling well enough on his own.
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Misener later recalls that when the bolt of lightning hit him, one food was already on Ford's running board while the other was still on the ground.
"I believe they saved my life," Misener told CTV News. At the very least, Misener believes that his Crocs somehow saved him from even worse injuries.
Risks and Odds of Lightning Strikes
According to National Geographic's quick rundown on lightning strikes, the odds of a person being struck by lightning for any given year, at least in the US, is 1 in 700,000. For an entire lifetime, the average person faces a 1 in 3,000 chance of getting hit by lightning. However, some people like Roy Cleveland Sullivan, known as the "Human Lightning Rod," have been hit by lightning more often than others. Sullivan was struck on seven different occasions between 1942 and 1977 and survived all of them.
According to NOAA's National Weather Service, an annual average of 270 lightning-related injuries were reported from 2009 to 2018, resulting in an average of 27 deaths per year. Furthermore, about 10 percent of lightning victims are killed, with the remaining 90 percent faced with different forms of damages.
As lightning enters and exits the body, it often causes deep wounds and third-degree burns. As in the case of Misener, explosions sometimes occur due to the surrounding air being superheated to temperatures five times hotter than the Sun's surface (50,000 degrees Fahrenheit). His shoes were probably knocked away as the lightning tried to escape through his feet.
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