FOREMAN SAID STOP JUST AS LIGHTNING STRUCK
Maria Pascual died tallying up cucumbers in north Broward field.
As workers bent down to pull cucumbers at a farm southwest of Boca Raton, foreman Jim Gamble scanned the skies. He heard thunder and saw cracks of lightning in the distance. Nearby, supervisor Maria Francisco Pascual stood with a hand-held device, adding up cucumbers picked.
Gamble turned to crew leader Pascual Francisco. “Should we stop?” the foreman asked.
As soon as Gamble said it, a crack split the sky.
Francisco got his bearings. He looked around. Maria Pascual, his sister, lay in the dirt. A bolt of lightning had slammed into her head, raced through her body and torn a hole in her shoe. She was dead.
A Broward County Sheriff’s report and information from the county’s medical examiner provide more details about that millisecond of impact May 16 that left a mother and grandmother dead and put two co-workers in a hospital.
Pascual, 53, of Lake Worth, left a husband, three daughters, two sons and 12 grandchildren, sister Alicia Pascual told The Palm Beach Post the day after her death.
“She was passionate of what she was doing there. That was her living,” Pascual said. “There’s no words that can describe how beautiful she is.”
Maria Pascual’s sister said Maria grew up in Guatemala and left in her 20s. She spent the next quarter-century-plus as a migrant worker. For the past 15 years, she’d been at C.W. Hendrix Farm, located along Loxahatchee Road far west of Parkland in northern Broward County. Pascual Francisco, her brother, coordinated the buses that bring workers to the farm.
The sister said she was told Maria was struck as she stood, one hand holding her cellphone and the other a portable device into which she entered readings each time a worker dumped a bucket of produce into a bin. She said a cousin who was a co-worker saw the bolt hit Maria.
An official at the Broward Medical Examiner said Wednesday the report was not complete, but that the woman had a burn mark on her head and her boot was blown out where the bolt
exited.
According to a Broward County Sheriff’s incident report, Gamble, the foreman, told deputies the lightning bolt hit about 2 p.m. He con- tacted farm owner C.W. Hendrix, then moved his work truck to where co-workers placed Pascual in the front passenger seat. Gamble then raced about a fourth of a mile to the entrance, where he met Broward County dep- uties and paramedics. A fire-rescue lieutenant then declared Pascual dead at 2:25 p.m.
Co-worker Alfonso Ordonez, who had been knocked off a truck by the lightning strike, was unconscious but alive. Another worker drove him to the farm entrance, and he was taken by paramedics to North Broward Medical Center. His condition was not known Wednesday. The sheriff ’s report said another worker, Bertila Alvarenga, who deputies said was in her 40s, did not have life-threatening injuries and drove herself to JFK Medical Center in Atlantis. The report said deputies and fire-rescue work- ers did not immediately go to the site of the lightning strike because of flooding and mud and because of weather safety concerns.
By 4:45 p.m., an investigator for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had arrived at the farm, the report said.
Gamble, who lives west of Boca Raton, said Wednesday by phone that he was busy working and had no comment. A woman who answered the phone at Hendrix Farms said the company could not comment.