Lightning strikes twice

HAMLIN, Pa. (AP) — Lightning can strike twice. Just ask Don Frick.

Mr. Frick said he survived his second lightning strike Friday — 27 years to the day of his first — and emerged shaken with only a burned zipper and a hole in the back of his jeans.

“I’m lucky I’m alive,” Mr. Frick told the Associated Press.

Mr. Frick was attending Hamlin’s Ole Tyme Daz festival on Friday afternoon when a storm approached quickly. He and six others sought refuge in a shed shortly before lightning struck the ground nearby. The strike sent a shock through Mr. Frick and four others in the shed.

“It put me up against the wall,” said Mr. Frick, 68. “When I came to and realized I was alive, the first thing that came to my mind was that I’m pretty lucky.

“It burned my zipper off, burned my pockets, but didn’t burn me.”

None of the others in the shed was seriously injured, Mr. Frick said.

Twenty-seven years earlier, Mr. Frick was driving a tractor-trailer in Lenox, Pa., when the antenna was struck by lightning, he said. He said that his left side was injured in that strike and that he spent three to four weeks recovering.