Jun 23, 2008 9:27 am US/Eastern
Cohasset Man Survives Lightning Strike
COHASSET (WBZ) ―
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Photo from Annetta Aaberg
A Cohasset man was hit by lightning and lived to talk about it.
Scott O'Day and his wife Tucker went for a walk on a beach in Scituate Friday just before they planned to go to dinner to celebrate his 49th birthday.
A storm moved in fast and just as they were turning around to head home, Scott was hit.
"It threw me 5-to-6 feet forward right out of my shoes and I landed on some rocks," he told WBZ.
"It was just this incredibly fast, loud boom and I was pitched forward and it felt a mild electric shock. I can't even describe it, it was a really odd feeling and then just getting pushed forward, like a big the wind pushing forward," said Tucker O'Day.
The next thing she knew her husband was lying on the rocks.
"It was pouring rain but it was like everything had stopped. He was just laying face down on the ground, bleeding, staring straight ahead. He was unconscious."
Scott O'Day said he doesn't remember everything.
"The next thing I know Tuck's leaning over me pulling up into her lap telling me everything's going to be okay. I couldn't feel my legs."
"All I kept yelling out was 'I can't feel my legs, I can't feel my legs' and she kept saying 'you're okay, you're okay."
O'Day and his wife were more than a half mile from the road when the lightning struck. Fortunately, there was a boat beached nearby and the people on board had a cell phone to call 911.
"I don't know how we would have managed if that boat hadn't been there," Tucker said.
The harbormaster drove the O'Days down the river to a dock where they met an ambulance.
"I'm just really grateful to be alive," Scott said.
"I'm really grateful Tuck was there to help me because if I had been out there by myself I wouldn't have made it."
Scott O'Day is also grateful to the paramedics, the boaters who were nearby and everyone else who came to help him.
He's still achy but feeling much better.
The O'Days were told the lightning may have entered Scott's left shoulder and exited his right foot.
Scott O'Day wasn't the only person in Massachusetts struck by lightning during Friday's storms.
Ralph Potter, 47, of Methuen, was killed when he was hit while walking along a trail at Winnekenni Castle in Haverhill.
Being hit by lightning is certainly not common, but it does happen a bit more than you might think.
According to the National Weather Service, the U.S. has averaged about 62 lightning deaths a year in the last 30 years. Most are in Florida.
Only about 10-percent of the people who get hit are killed.
90 percent suffer varying degrees of health problems -- some serious, some not.
The odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are roughly 1 in 5,000.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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