AMBULANCE shift-leader Ester Armela, based in Madrid, has revealed why the hand you hold your umbrella in if you are caught out in a storm with forked lightning could save your life.
“Carry it in your right hand,” she said in an interview on Cadena Ser radio this week.
Ester was one of the paramedic team who attended to a man in the Madrid-region town of Torrelodones on Tuesday night when his umbrella was struck by lightning.
Other than extremely painful, the victim's injuries are not life-threatening and not expected to be life-limiting, although he is likely to be scarred.
The reason he is alive and relatively well is because he is right-handed.
“If he had been carrying his umbrella in his left hand, the lightning strike would, logically, have gone through his heart,” Ester explains.
“And he'd probably have gone into cardiac arrest.
“As it was, the lightning entered via his right hand and came out of his left leg.”
In the process, he suffered groin injuries and various third-degree burns along the part of his body the lightning cut through.
Unlike in more northern, damper climates, electric storms in Spain nearly always involve forked lightning, not sheet lightning – the latter of which does not strike and is considered much safer.
Sheet lightning is formed when a cloud covering stops it from reaching the Earth's surface, and appears to light up the whole sky.
This week's sudden storms started in the north and north-west and gradually moved south and south-east, but petered out before they reached the Mediterranean coastlines.
Residents and holidaymakers were half-hoping for a sudden cloudburst to break the humidity after a sweltering weekend, but other than a very slight drop in temperature and dark clouds overhead, those on the southern and eastern coasts and the islands escaped the storms altogether.
Tomorrow (Friday) is expected to see the start of further rain storms and possibly even hail, but at the moment, these are only forecasted to affect the north of the mainland and may not reach the 'Costas' and islands, which returned to typical Spanish summer weather just before sunset last night.
