NOTTOWAY COUNTY, Va. — A Nottoway County man remains to be recovering after a lightning strike landed him within the hospital.

52-year-old Bobby Pridemore was transferring cows in a pasture about 100 yards behind his dwelling alongside Bible Road in Crewe Friday night when lightning struck a steel gate and despatched a cost down the barbed wire fence the place he was standing.

Pridemore’s proper hand and hip have been touching the fence about 200 yards from the place the bolt hit the gate, and he suffered {an electrical} shock.

“He kept saying all he could think was he messed up this time,” Donna Pridemore, Bobby’s spouse, defined. “He truly thought his arm was gone.”

The strike despatched him flying again off the fence. Donna and the couple’s daughter, Kaitlyn, have been inside the house on the time.

“We heard the loud boom, and it was enough to rattle the house pretty much,” she famous. “I was like, Kaitlyn, where’s your dad? And Kaitlyn was like, I don’t know, Mom.”

Kaitlyn referred to as her father, and by chance, he was capable of swipe the telephone together with his left hand to reply and inform them to name 911.

Bobby additionally discovered the power to tug himself again on his four-wheeler and sped to his dwelling, the place he was met by Nottoway Emergency Squad crews. They examined him and transported him to Chippenham Medical Center, the place medical doctors mentioned he suffered a small third-degree burn on his left hip.

“They wanted to keep him overnight,” famous Donna. “They checked his heart out, and his heart looked good. They gave us instructions on how to care for the wound on his hip.”

Donna mentioned one thing she will not neglect is the distinct odor coming from her husband after the incident.

“The smell of burnt skin,” mentioned Donna. “I don’t know how to describe it because that’s what it was. It was just a really bad smell, and he stayed that way. We could still smell it on him from when he got home from the hospital the next day.”

Bobby remains to be recovering from the emotional toll the incident took on him, however he was again at work Monday morning.

The Pridemores are further grateful for the help of their small neighborhood.

“Half the neighborhood was there checking on him within minutes of the squad being there,” Pridemore defined. “We had a neighbor that came and brought him a couple of lottery tickets Saturday night, and just sitting there Sunday morning I had gotten up and they were still sleeping, and I looked online to see if we happened to win. And they weren’t winners, but literally the first thing that comes to my mind was we are winners.”

This is not the primary scary incident to occur to the Pridemores. Bobby can be a thyroid most cancers survivor, and their daughter Kaitlyn suffered a severed aorta throughout a routine gallbladder surgical procedure again in 2020 and remains to be in bodily remedy.

“Things like this, normally as scary and as hard as they can be, truly, truly bring out the real blessings that you have in life,” she famous. “Because we still have him and we still have her, so even if things have changed, I still have to say that our blessings are just so much bigger than the bad things.”

According to the CDC, the chances of being struck by lightning in a given yr are lower than one in one million, and nearly 90% of all lightning strike victims survive. Virginia has had fewer than 5 lightning deaths since 2006.

Around 300 persons are struck by lightning per yr, and about 50 folks die from the strike, in accordance with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The National Weather Service mentioned the most secure place you could be throughout a storm is inside, however if you’re outdoor, listed below are some final resort tricks to keep protected:

• Immediately get off elevated areas akin to hills, mountain ridges or peaks
• Never lie flat on the bottom
• Never shelter underneath an remoted tree
• Never use a cliff or rocky overhang for shelter
• Immediately get out and away from ponds, lakes and different our bodies of water
• Stay away from objects that conduct electrical energy (barbed wire fences, energy traces, windmills, and so on.)