Published: July 29,2016
A New Jersey teenager got little more than
he bargained for earlier this week when he was struck by lightning while
trying to capture a bolt on film at a local beach.
Sixteen-year-old Ethan Riozzi-Bodine was waiting out the storm under “a little overhang" in Bradley Beach, when a lightning bolt hit the ground, “maybe 10 to 15 feet away from me,” ABC News reports.
"The whole ground just vibrated and it went up through my feet, up through my body, through my chest, and out through my arms," Ethan told WPVI.
Ethan Riozzi-Bodine survived a lightning strike while filming a storm on a New Jersey beach earlier this week. (Screenshot courtesy of KGNS)
Ethan
captured the entire incident on video. You can’t actually see the bolt
that narrowly missed him, but you can hear his reactions.
“You ... actually hear me get electrocuted in the video; I’m like ‘argh!’” Ethan told WFLA.
Ethan
had been riding his bike home Monday evening when the storm blew
through, but stopped near the beach because the bike chain came loose,
ABC News reports.
That bike very likely saved his
life. Doctors told Ethan that if he hadn’t bee “holding onto my bike I
wouldn’t be here right now, because my bike kind of grounded me because
of the rubber tires and the rubber grips,” Ethan told WFLA. “So if I
wasn’t holding onto my bike, I wouldn’t be here right now talking to
you.”
Doctors found that Ethan had high levels of
the enzyme creatine in his system, something that sometimes happens
sometimes after a major trauma like a heart attack, but other than that
he was fine.
“They could not believe that he
walked away from this, that he did not have any significant injuries,”
Elaine Riozzi-Bodine, the teen’s mother, told News 12 New Jersey.
Ethan, who works as a lifeguard, told News 12 that he’ll take extra precautions during lightning storms from now on, especially while working on the beach.
“You
always think, ‘I'm invincible. I'm 16,’ you think that’s never going to
happen, but things like that do actually happen,” he told News 12.
Ethan told ABC News that in hindsight the experience was “pretty cool”, but Elaine has a different take.
"I
just think he's extremely lucky," she told ABC. "I'm just blessed it
had a happy ending. It could have very easily been a completely
different story. I'm just very fortunate that he's OK."
MORE: Lightning By the Numbers
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