The Associated Press
KALISPELL, Mont. — Members of the Flathead Hotshots firefighting crew say their emergency training helped them keep calm after two crew members were struck by lightning last week.
Heather McEvoy, 25, and Beau Morin, 29, have recovered since the May 29 strike on a ridge southwest of Whitefish.
Nine members of the elite firefighting crew were working at the site of a prescribed burn when a storm rolled in early in the afternoon.
“There was a little rumbling and I saw a downstrike” on a ridge not far to the northeast, said Bert Smith, the ranking supervisor that day. “It all happened really quick.”
Smith told crew members to start hiking out to their vehicles, about a quarter-mile away.
McEvoy and Morin, 29, were walking by a large larch tree when it was struck by lightning. “The big larch got it,” Morin said. “I remember kind of seizing up and falling over backward. She fell over backward,” he said of McEvoy.
Morin said there was a huge noise and the lightning charge arced from the larch to a smaller fir tree nearby.
He tried to get up to help McEvoy, but found “the whole left side of my body was numb.”
McEvoy said she remembers “a bright yellow light over my shoulder. I knew it was lightning. I thought I was done. I thought they were going to be doing CPR on me.”
She said she was initially numb from the waist down, but when that faded she felt a sharp, pulsing pain in her lower right leg.
One crew member, Ichiro Stewart, a trained emergency medical technician, raced to help McEvoy and then radioed for Smith, who was at another location on the burn. Dispatchers were called and the ALERT helicopter responded.
Smith said the crew responded quickly and with composure. Stewart carried McEvoy out of the woods on his back, Morin walked and other crew members gathered up gear.
It took about 40 minutes from the time of the lightning strike to the time McEvoy was aboard the helicopter, Smith said. Morin was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Both were released that night.