LEE COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) — The Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Southwest Florida caught a lightning bolt striking one of their trees on camera. It happened in their back parking lot. The sheriff's office said no one was hurt. One vehicle had mechanical damage.
The sheriff's office posted the video of the strike to their Facebook Page Thursday.
The National Weather Service said, “about 25 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes occur in the United States each year. Over the last 30 years, the U.S. has averaged 51 lightning fatalities per year. Only about 10 percent of people struck by lightning are actually killed. The other 90 percent must cope with varying degrees of discomfort and disability, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Typically, the vast majority of lightning victims each year are male (in 261 instances from 2006-2013, 81 percent of lightning fatalities were male and 19 percent were female).
The weather service also said, “most lightning victims are not struck during the worst of a thunderstorm but rather before or after the storm reaches its greatest intensity. This is because many people are unaware that lightning can strike as far as 25 miles away from its parent thunderstorm.”
A lightning bolt struck a truck on Interstate 10 in the Florida Panhandle in 2021. Click here to see photos of that incident.
