KEYT: Paso Robles man survives lightning strike
Image from KEYT TV
James Bensen and his dog struck while driving truck on Hwy 101
– KEYT TV reports James Bensen and his dog Buster have had some close calls over the years but nothing like what happened to them on Highway 101 during the powerful storm that moved through the Central Coast over the weekend.
“Right now I’m just thanking the good Lord that I’m not dead to be truthful with you,” Bensen told KEYT while sitting in front of his RV that he and Buster call home, “that there were enough faculties in me that I knew I had to get off the highway and get somewhere safe so no one else would have a problem, up to then I did not know that I had been hit by lightning.”
Bensen says he and Buster were returning home from bringing birthday presents to his granddaughter in Templeton Sunday and had just passed the Highway 46 West off-ramp when it happened.
“And I got about maybe 200 yards from there and then the biggest noise that you would ever want to hear,” Bensen says, “I’m picking myself up from down near the floor because my head hit the mirror, and my chest hit the steering wheel.”
“A man came running over to me and he’s beating on my window and I look over at him like this and he says are you alright? I said yeah I’m alright, what just happened? He says lightning hit your truck!” Bensen recalls.
The lightning strike cracked Bensen’s windshield, ripped the antenna off and shut down the electrical system in his Ford pickup truck including the power steering and the power brakes.
“I never saw the lightning, not at all,” Bensen says, “the only thing that happened, the only thing I can remember, was this big loud boom and my windshield being cracked, the loudest noise, scared the devil out of my poor dog.”
Read the full story at KEYT.
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