Lightning Strike Near White House Kills Wisconsin Couple, critically Injures 2 Others – IOTW Report

Lightning Strike Near White House Kills Wisconsin Couple, critically Injures 2 Others

FOX Weather: WASHINGTON – An elderly couple was killed and two others were critically injured Thursday evening when lightning struck near the White House, sending police scrambling to help victims in Lafayette Park.

A spokesperson for the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department said uniformed agents from the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Park Police were first on the scene and provided life-saving aid until paramedics arrived.

Firefighters reported two men and two women were transported to local hospitals in critical condition. Two of the victims later died Friday morning, according to D.C. Police. They were identified as a 76-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman visiting from Wisconsin. The other two victims are believed to remain in critical condition.

“We are saddened by the tragic loss of life after the lightning strike in Lafayette Park,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement released to the media. “Our hearts are with the families who lost loved ones, and we are praying for those still fighting for their lives.” more here

22 Comments on Lightning Strike Near White House Kills Wisconsin Couple, critically Injures 2 Others

  1. When Barky was Preezy, there was an earthquake so bad that the Washington monument was damaged and they had to close it for three years. The National Cathedral was also damaged. I have a feeling that even worse acts of God are going to hit DC while Biden is shuffling around the White House.

    Best to keep your distance. Nothing good happens there anymore. That swamp is cursed, and I don’t want to be anywhere near it.

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  2. According to some sources Iran is promising to finish nuclear capability and vaporize New York City; if this is what is coming to why omit D.C.? They ain’t our friends but just sayin….

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  3. Pelosi and Schumer both declared the lightning strike to be the result of climate change, further reinforcing the need to enrich their friends, family and political donors with subsidies for economically unfeasible technologies.

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  4. Growing up in a very rural part of Washington state, with acres of open fields bordered by forests, we kids were ordered to drop everything and RUN back to the house if we heard thunder. I’ve only ever been very close to a lightning strike and it was close enough! I was just parking my car a few blocks down the hill from our house, ready to go pick up something at a shop when “BOOM!”, the area around me turned brilliant white and all the hair stood up on my arms. I think it was just a little to my right and behind me. It reminded me of a July 4th celebration when someone misfired a large rocket that exploded about 5 feet in front of us.

    What a way to go. More proof that God numbers our days before we are born. When you’re time is up, it’s up.

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  5. AbigailAdams
    AUGUST 5, 2022 AT 8:21 PM

    “More proof that God numbers our days before we are born. When you’re time is up, it’s up.”

    …the ephemerality of life sometimes makes it seem that God in His infinite wusdom is on the arbitrary and capricious side.

    I am a decade or so past the halfway point as these things are reconed in the Western world and in no way extraordinary, but in my time of abiding I have seen infants die in their cribs and in their mother’s thoughtless arms in car accidents; seen youths recently at play exploded beneath the merciless wheels of an inattentive driver; seen teens make a dramatic suicide gesture a bit too unintentionally efficiently, tipping away from “gesture” to slide fully into suicide; seen young men die of unexplained cardiac arrest in industrial bathrooms; seen a youthful athelete die instantly on a basketball court when an aneurysm he never knew he had exploded deep in his chest; seen a middle aged man drown in his own bathtub with his back severely burnt when in the extemety of fire he tried to hide beneath the water and apparently found the water less disagreeable than the flames; saw a cancer patient die strapped to a portable toilet in the middle of his living room because his elderly wife had not the strength to get even his cancer-lightened frame to a real toilet; seen many elderly die not surprisingly but never when or how they expected; and I’ve carried young men’s caskets to their final resting place, one time laying a father who died stupidly next to his son who died innocently three days after his birth , their deaths spaced by a decade.

    This and more have I seen. None of it ever seemed to make much sense. Not then, nor later. No lesson, no moral, just dead when God pulled their number, and even when expecting it they never seemed to know the day and the hour.

    I particularly remember being on a fireground early on where I was mostly there to learn, so I wasn’t on the crew that actually found the deceased man who was trapped that day. I remember when the word came back that the man was beyond help, declared so by a flight surgeon we had summoned, that I looked at the massed fleet we had arranged as quickly as possible, at the trucks, ladders, ambulances, police cars, medic units, and helicopter forlornly still turning its blades though its purpose has been overtaken by events, and at the dozen or three of trained, skilled, expeienced personnel in my immediate view and thinking how even all THAT was insufficient to keep Death at bay.

    Well, I was there to learn. And I did. But it sure wasn’t the lesson I wanted.

    None of us in guareteed a time. Not even the next minute. Youth is no defense, nor guile, not fitness nor paranoia can change your time. You may stand Death off for awhile, but he claims all eventually.

    No man knows his time.

    No one gets out alive.

    “Fates, we know your pleasure. That we will die, we know. It is but the time and drawing of days out that gives men pause.”
    -“Julius Caesar”, Shakespeare

    The Reaper will not be denied. All you can really do is live like you can die at any time.

    Because you can.

    “A little Indian brave who before he was ten,
    Played war games in the woods with his Indian friends,
    And he built a dream that when he grew up,
    He would be a fearless warrior Indian Chief

    Many moons passed and more the dream grew stronger,
    Until tomorrow, he would sing his first war song,
    And fight his first battle, but something went wrong,
    Surprise attack killed him in his sleep that night”
    -Jimi Hendrix, “Castles Made Of Sand”

    https://youtu.be/jhOHbrs48CE

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  6. @SNS — Yes, and how many times did you witness a miracle of life when, by all normal accounting, the person *should* have died? Is God arbitrary and capricious? Sometimes I think it appears he is, but then I remember the purpose of that life and the purpose of my own. He measures our value in this world in a very different way than I think we see it. I wouldn’t even try to guess why or how.

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