Young couple struck by lightning — and holding hands may have saved their lives
There was electricity in the air, millions of volts actually, when teens Dylan and Lexie walked through a Claremont neighborhood Thursday afternoon.
As the young couple strode the tree-lined streets in the Inland Empire community, a bolt of lightning shot from the sky and hit Dylan, passed through him to his girlfriend, Lexie, and into the ground, according to the couple’s interview with KCBS-TV.
Both came out of the incident with no apparent injuries. The station did not identify either juvenile by their last names.
“It was more of just kind of a shove, you know? Felt like I was getting hit over the head with metal or something,” Dylan told the station.
Lexie picked up the story from there.
“Next thing you know we’re on the ground and we gave each other the most terrified look you could possibly imagine,” she told KCBS.
The two thought it could have been an earthquake.
But Dr. Stefan Reynoso, who examined the couple afterward, said their hand-holding may have also saved them from being hurt or killed.
“It helped to diffuse the electrical current that ran through their bodies,” Reynoso told the station.
The lightning strike was just one of hundreds across California on Thursday, as thunderstorms rolled through Southern California’s deserts, Central California and the Bay Area.
There were more than 500 lightning strikes in Central and Northern California alone, the National Weather Service said.
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