Chunk Of I-10 Crashes Through Truck After Lightning Strike

WALTON COUNTY, FL — Driving through severe weather in Florida may be inevitable for residents and visitors of the Sunshine State, but the experience nearly turned deadly for two people in a pickup truck Monday morning in the state’s panhandle.

Lightning struck the highway on Interstate 10 near mile marker 81, sending a chunk of pavement through the Ford truck’s front windshield and out the back, the Walton County Fire Rescue said on Twitter.

Lindsey Darby, the agency’s public information officer, told CNN its battalion chief, Christopher Brown, had never before seen pavement struck by lightning fly into a vehicle.

"He said, 'I've been in the fire service for 19 years, and I have never seen anything like this,'” Darby told the news network.

Both people in the truck were hospitalized but are expected to survive the unusual encounter.

They suffered only minor lacerations from the shattered glass and “will be fine,” Corey Dobridnia, public affairs coordinator for the Walton County Sheriff’s Office, told the Tallahassee Democrat.

Just after 7:30 AM this morning, WCFR was dispatched to a traffic crash near mile marker 81 eastbound on I-10.

Lightening struck the roadway, causing a chunk of the road to fly through the windshield of the truck.

Both occupants of the vehicle were transported with injuries. pic.twitter.com/or5E2BtMhd
— Walton County Fire Rescue (@WCFRFL) May 10, 2021

Haley Brink, a CNN meteorologist, said “the energy from a lightning strike has to go somewhere” in explaining how such a phenomenon could occur.

"When lightning strikes an object, such as pavement, it can cause that object to ‘explode’ due to the lightning's pressure blast wave, which is caused by the sudden super heating of the air surrounding the lightning strike," Brink said.

Florida has long been considered the “lightning capital” of the United States. But it has recently been unseated by Oklahoma as the state with the most lightning strikes, the Tallahassee Democrat reported, citing Vaisala, a Finland-based company that tracks weather data.