Savin Hill lightning strike victim remains in critical condition

The sky over Savin Hill started to look ominous to Drew Milan on Saturday afternoon, but nothing remarkable until a “pretty intense” bolt shattered the humid air just near the park he stood in.

A dog, a distinctive-looking blue-eyed shepherd whom he had seen earlier, came dashing by, but the woman who’d been walking him wasn’t following.

That “just immediately said to me that something else was happening,” he said Sunday.

While some people ran after the dog, Milan headed in the direction the shepherd had come from, and found two people administering CPR to the woman who was lying on Savin Hill Beach: Tracy Cronin and her boyfriend, both nurses.

“The fact that they were just there was miraculous,” he said.

Cronin, a nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital who lives nearby, had begun administering CPR to the woman she said was unresponsive, with no pulse and with visible burns. Multiple people had called 911, and neighbors on the scene quickly directed the first-arriving emergency medical workers to the right place, EMS Deputy Superintendent Steven McHugh said.

The first responder to arrive was an EMT who had been making the rounds as a field training supervisor, checking in on new personnel, EMS union president Matt Anderson said. She took over the medical care while more EMTs and a paramedic came on scene.

The victim’s pulse returned in the ambulance, and personnel took her to Boston Medical Center, he said.

What some call the “chain of survival” remained unbroken, McHugh said, getting the woman who had been struck by lightning to the hospital, where she continues to fight for her life in what State Police say is critical condition.

“They kept that chain of survival going,” McHugh said in an interview Sunday, a day after lightning struck Boston’s Savin Hill Beach around 3:30 p.m. “They kept a bridge for the 911 community to get there.”

McHugh said that, “If at any point the chain is broken, the odds of survival drop.”

Little information was released Sunday about the victim.

State Police, who patrol Savin Hill Beach, said Sunday afternoon that she “remained in critical condition” at the hospital.

The woman was walking her dog, Bruce, Saturday afternoon and had stopped to speak with another walker when a lightning bolt struck the area where they were standing. Authorities believe the other walker, a 49year-old woman, was not directly hit by lightning, and police said she was alert after the strike.

Injuries from lightning strikes are rare in Boston, but they happen. In 2008, 10 people were hurt in Franklin Field during a sudden storm when lightning struck the tree they were sheltering under. Four years later, two people were injured in a lightning strike while watching fireworks in South Boston.

When EMTs find someone non-responsive from a lightning strike as they did on Saturday, McHugh said, they proceed like they would in any cardiac-arrest call. The priority is to get the person’s heart restarted.

“They’ve had plenty of those calls, unfortunately,” he said.

Matt Anderson, president of the EMS union, praised his members’ work after what had been a long, busy week, with a high call volume Thursday and Friday, when temperatures and humidity were dangerously high.

McHugh said what people should take away from this is that if someone seems to be struggling, “don’t be afraid to act on something and reach out.” Render what aid you can, he said, and call 911.