Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Landscape worker hospitalized after nearby lightning strike
PEMBROKE PINES – On a stormy South Florida afternoon, amid rain showers and booming thunder, a landscape worker was jolted and seriously hurt when lightning struck nearby.
It happened shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday near the Cinnamon Ridge development on the 8600 block of Pembroke Road, according to Pembroke Pines police.
“One male has been transported to the hospital with injuries,” police said in a social media posting.
A rescue crew took the worker to Memorial Regional Hospital.
A witness said the landscaping crew had taken shelter from the rain and lightning, but the man who was hurt went to retrieve a shovel, WFOR-Ch. 4 reported.
The worker was in cardiac arrest when he was taken to the hospital, according to WSVN-Ch. 7.
“He wasn’t talking. He was just moving back and forth,” neighborhood resident Gisele Pean told the station.
Florida, which receives more lightning strikes than per square mile than any other state, is the perennial leader in U.S. lightning fatalities.
In Central Florida on Sunday, a 45-year-old North Carolina man, Benjamin Lee, died while riding on motorcycle on Interstate 95 when his helmet was struck by lightning.
According to the National Lightning Safety Council, Lee’s was the second lightning fatality in the U.S. in 2019. The other happened in Texas in early May and killed a man who had been camping, according to the council.
During the last ten years, an average of 27 people across the country have died from lightning strikes, according to figures compiled by the organization.
In March 2018, Maria Franciso Pascual, 53, of Lake Worth, died after being struck by lightning at the C.W. Hendix Farm on Loxahatchee Road in Parkland. Pascual had been working in a field when the lightning struck, killing her and injuring two co-workers.
Lightning has also posed a deadly threat to animals.
Just days ago it was revealed that two giraffes were killed at Lion Country Safari on May 3 as a severe and fast-moving storm rolled through Palm Beach County.