Lempster, NH Woman Struck By Lightning
LEMPSTER, N.H. (CBS) -- A Lempster, New Hampshire woman was back home recovering Wednesday night after she was hit by lightning.
Lempster fire chief Jon Thomas described the unsettling weather conditions.
"Storms were pretty violent heavy wind rain," he says. He also said lightning hit the ground several times. One those strikes sent Rebecca Welch to the hospital.
"She could feel her hair was burned and her foot was burned and she had tingling down her arm," says Harvey Ferland, Welch's fiancée.
Ferland said he heard the lightning hit the ground, but he something was wrong in his own house when his fiancée immediately started screaming.
"She didn't say anything. She just screamed she was in just so much pain," Ferland said.
With the electricity gone at the house and no cell service at the outskirts of town where they live, the family drove to call 911.
The fiancée began figuring out how the electricity went through Welch. The lightning hit the base of a tree sending dirt, rocks and tree roots across the road.
The electricity also damaged the top a transformer. Ferland thinks the current traveled through the wires or the rebar in the concrete floor where Welch was standing in the bathroom brushing her teeth.
Thomas summed up Welch's outcome.
"Extremely lucky anytime electricity passes through your body," said the fire chief.
Ferland says his fiancée is now recovering at home and her prognosis is good. The couple is 19 years into their engagement and Ferland admits surviving a lightning strike might make them lucky enough to go for marriage.
