The Morning Sentinel

OAKLAND

July 31

Teen singed but OK after lightning jolt

By Scott Monroe smonroe@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

OAKLAND -- Nathan Natole, 18, was sitting in the living room about 8:30 p.m. July 21, playing poker on his Dell laptop computer.

Outside, a light rain fell and rumbles of thunder echoed in the distance.

The laptop's battery was running low, so Natole told his mother, Pam Natole, that he was going downstairs to his bedroom to plug it in and recharge. He sat on his bed, his back against the wall, with the computer on his lap.

About five minutes later, the house lights flickered after a loud "boom" and a flash of light, which tripped the smoke alarms and a circuit-breaker.

Pam ran to the top of the stairs and yelled, "Nate, are you all right?"

Silence.

Downstairs, she found her son "in a full seizure," with blood spilling from his mouth because he had bitten his tongue. She called 911 and was told to try and flatten out his shaking body.

"As I grabbed his legs, I felt the electricity in my hands," Pam recalled. "Then he went limp."

Nathan Natole spent two days in the hospital before returning to his Oak Street home.

In a recent interview, Natole said he's been feeling fine and the only lasting evidence of the incident is a scar on his left leg and a small patch of scorched hair on the back of his head.

Natole recently graduated from Messalonskee High School and plans to attend Husson University in Bangor this fall, majoring in hospitality management.

Although the National Weather Service says the odds that you'll be struck by lightning in a given year is one in 750,000, Natole's experience comes on the heels of a similar case nearby.

Vicki Nadeau, 20, of Winslow, apparently was struck by a bolt of lightning June 20 in Waterville. Nadeau, a waitress at Ruby Tuesday, was walking out to the parking lot during a storm when she was zapped and thrown back against a wall, leaving her bloodied and burned.

John Jensenius is a warning-coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Maine and a national spokesman for lightning awareness. Jensenius said the two local cases of lightning striking people -- in Waterville and Oakland -- are the only cases he's aware of so far this year in Maine.

"It's fairly unusual for people to be struck by lightning, but at the same time it's probably not as unusual as people think," Jensenius said, "but it is unusual to have two people being struck and injured in two separate incidents so close together."

It's estimated that between 500 and 600 people are hit by lightning in the U.S. each year, Jensenius said, and about one in 10 of the people struck are killed. As of Thursday, 21 Americans had died from lightning strikes so far this year, according to Jensenius, and Maine has had five fatalities during the last decade.

Nathan Natole said he has no memory of the lightning strike. One minute he was using the laptop; the next he was in the emergency room at Inland Hospital in Waterville. Pam Natole said her son started to show signs of consciousness in the ambulance.

On a stretcher and wearing a neck brace, Natole was taken by ambulance from Inland to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor in case he needed the services of a trauma unit. He had never had a seizure before.

Natole underwent x-rays and tests during two days at the hospital and was determined to be OK. Pam Natole said her son was "quite the attraction" in Bangor -- hospital officials were interested in his case, because it appeared that the electrical current had traveled through both his heart and brain.

Natole said he had been diagnosed with mononucleosis earlier that week and said he was feeling more pain from the viral illness than from being zapped by lightning. Natole said he planned to have an eye examination for possible after-effects involving cataracts.

His laptop appeared to be unharmed by the lightning strike.

"I'm just happy to be alive," he said. "I am a little nervous about storms now."

For Pam Natole, the experience has been a wake-up call to be extra careful when a storm is nearby.

"It's a good lesson," she said. "People need to think twice."

Jensenius said it's important for people to realize that you're safe only if inside a hard-topped metal vehicle or a building and away from anything that could conduct electricity.

"If you can hear thunder, you're within striking distance of a storm," Jensenius said. "Even if it's a distant rumble. You can hear thunder about 10 miles away."

Scott Monroe -- 861-9253

smonroe@centralmaine.com