Washington: Two men and two women were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries Thursday evening after an apparent lightning strike in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, according to DC fire officials.
The four adults were found just before 7pm in the center of the park, about 100 feet from the statue of Andrew Jackson, said fire department spokesman Vito Maggiolo.
All four people were taken to the hospital with potentially life-threatening injuries.
The precise cause of their injuries remains under investigation, authorities said.
The lightning was unleashed by a severe thunderstorm that swept across the District just before 7pm. The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for much of the Beltway area between 6:30 and 7:15pm., cautioning of the threat of damaging wind gusts up to 60 mph and quarter-size hail.
Chris Vagasky, an analyst for Vaisala, which operates a national lightning network, said in a message that there was a "6 stroke flash near the White House that hit the same point on the ground" at 6:49pm. He explained that means six individual surges of electricity hit the same point on the ground within half a second.
Numerous storms, containing frequent lightning, flared up in the region Thursday evening after temperature soared into the mid-to-upper 90s earlier in the day, prompting a heat advisory. Heat indexes, a measure of how hot it feels factoring in humidity, reached 100 to 110 degrees.
The heat-fueled storms unleashed a wind gust to 58 mph at Reagan National Airport and toppled trees around Winchester, Columbia and Baltimore. The torrents also spurred multiple reports of flooded roads around Baltimore.
Lightning kills 23 people in the United States in an average year and has resulted in nine fatalities so far in 2022.
