Pa. Man a Real Lightning Rod

Lightning can strike twice. Just ask Pennsylvania resident Don Frick.

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

“I’m lucky I’m alive,” Frick told The Associated Press in a phone interview Sunday night.

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

“It put me up against the wall,” said 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 were seriously injured, Frick said.

Twenty-seven years earlier, 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 was laid up for 3 to 4 weeks.