When did this happen? If it was long enough ago, they (and you) may not have known about CPR.
Years ago, I was laying in bed, awake, while a thunderstorm raged at my house, and a bolt struck between my house and the neighbors’. There was a blinding flash and a simultaneous loud crack, and the cat who had been curled up next to my head vanished. I wondered if she had somehow been vaporized, and then looked under my bed and there she was.
Decades ago, we heard a huuuuge BANG!!! that seemed to be very close. We were in the basement of our house at the time. Soon afterward we noticed we had no running water. The lightning apparently hit the ground right next to the house and fried the underground well pump.
When i was 6 or so, a tree was hit right in front of our house - perhaps 40 feet away from me. Killed that tree dead.
Aside from that, no close calls.
Not long after I moved to the DC area a few decades ago, there was a nasty incident where a thunderstorm blew in while a bunch of people were attending a school soccer game or some such.
A number of the spectators took refuge… under a tree.
Yeah, several of them died. Interestingly, one of the survivors happened to work at my firm (not someone I interacted with regularly). He was evidently clinically dead for a short bit there.
The closest has been Manazas, and he’s about 1km away from my mother’s house as the crow flies. Manazas (“big hands” or “clumsy one”) is the nickname of the local statue of the Sacred Heart of Christ: it’s lost its hands several times and its head once to lightning strikes. People joke that if they had realized a statue on the ruins of the old castle would keep the cathedral from being hit by lightning (as it previously had on several occasions) they would have built it sooner.
Remember this? Didn’t realize it was that long ago.
I misspoke, it was lacrosse (the article references the incident I mentioned, further down).
Reminds me of a time I was driving home from O’Hare, and saw a transformer next to the highway hit.
Coincidentally, a brief but VERY violent storm passed thru the western Chicago suburbs yesterday eve. My wife and I were walking the dog, when we heard thunder. Headed for home. About 3 houses away, we felt a few big drops. When I got to my house, I looked back and could see a wall of rain coming down the block. :eek:
Not a lightning strike, but the rain was coming sideways, and the wind brought down a branch that took out the transformer in my neighbor’s backyard. We were out of power for about 4 hours. Reading by candlelight - how romantic! 
Lightning struck a tree next to my former apartment building a long time ago. I remember the explosion during the night. The next morning, I could see that the entire top of the tree was blown apart, leaving only bare sticks.
The lower part of the tree starting growing extra leaves in days. Soon, there was the trunk going up, and a big bush of leaves growing right out of the trunk. It looked like how a little kid would draw a picture of a tree, a black trunk and a big green blob on top for leaves. Well, with spindly bare branches sticking out above that.
I was so sad when the City came and cut that tree down. It had fought so hard to live by growing all those emergency leaves.
Just read a book called Sprout Lands, about how man has long managed woodlands though coppicing and pollarding. According to this book, in most deciduous trees, most cells have the ability to form any part of the tree. So, for example, if a limb touches the ground, it can grow roots.
Really fascinating discussion of how trees were historically managed to sustainably produce all manner of material from basketry stems to ship timbers.
Here’s some amazing super-slow-motion footage of lightning.
Pretty sure lightning struck this building while I was under it, waiting for a bus.
Check out the lightning strike when the video starts playing. Pause the video and use the “,” and “.” keys to move backwards and forwards, frame by frame. With this strike, one can visibly see, in one frame, the return stroke starting from the ground. According to Wikipedia, “the rate at which the return stroke current travels has been found to be around 100,000 km/s.”
In 1969 I was doing sets for a play at Old Town Studio in Albuquerque. Summertime. Thunderstorm time on a Saturday afternoon. Rehearsal was over and I was painting scenery for the opening. There was a little, 12 year old or so girl in the show, and she had to wait for her folks to come get her. She went out to the phone booth (what’s a phone booth…it’s a little place with a dial and a receiver. But that’s not important now.) She was gone a few minutes and the growing thunderstorm let out an enormous crash. Shook the fuck out of us. As in right on top of us. Poor little gal walked in white as a ghost. You okay? Yeah. No! Runs to me for comfort. She said when it happened all she saw was great flash of white. I figured the lightning had hit the telephone pole by the booth and gone down it surrounding the phone booth. A Faraday cage? Is that possible? Anyway I was her hero for comforting her, and at the cast party we had a my house later that night we all got to see some wild and crazy Americans land on the moon.
Bivouacking at one of the ranges in Fort Dix 4 soldiers in my unit were struck when a sudden storm came through. They all survived.
Several years earlier I was flying in an OH-58 in Fort Hood when the weather started to rapidly turned bad. We decided to set it down on one of the smaller runways in the training area. When we were less than a mile out there was a ground strike directly between us and the runway. We decided that right below us was a great place to land and ride it out. Helicopters are good that way.
Not me, but someone I used to know- she was the manager of a shop round the corner and I worked with her daughter- got hit by lightning while waiting at a bus stop with an umbrella. She was actually pretty much fine, though she got a burn down her hand where she’d been holding the umbrella, and all the muscles in one of her feet kinda stopped working for a few days. This does not explain what she did next though, which is get on the bus, go to work like normal, and not even mention anything to anyone until she got home that evening and her husband asked what the hell happened to her foot…
This in a country with free ambulance transport and medical care, incidentally.
A bit over a year ago we heard the boom of the thunder and saw the flash of lightning at the same time. Didn’t think much of it.
Realized later in the week that it somehow fried the DVR connected to cable, and the HDMI connector on the receiver. The rest of the receiver is still okay, fortunately.
Found out later that it had actually scored a direct hit on the neighbors’ house and they had to get the electricians it to repair the resulting problems and replace a lot of equipment. Each building has 8 apartments - we were the only ones in our building to be affected, but the other building had 8/8.
I can’t be certain, but I was at work and during a thunderstorm there was a huge bang that seemed to come from the roof of the neighbouring warehouse across the alley. I assumed that it was lightning striking its iron roof, but nothing subsequently occurred, so… lame finish to story, I never found out if it actually was what I thought.
1978
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When I was around 12 or 13, we had been out and came back to our house to find some odd stuff. A small palmetto tree next to the driveway was knocked over, a half dozen or so fist sized chunks of asphalt from the drive way were spread around, with corresponding holes in the driveway, our garage was full of smoke, and we had no power. My mom called the fire department, and when they got there, they pointed out that our electric meter had exploded. Lightning had struck the mast where the power line came into the meter. We later found out that it had fried all of our appliances, the TV, and the well pump in the backyard. The power company paid for all the replacements because the strike happened upstream of the meter. The smoke in the garage was I think from some rags near the driveway that were smoldering. The firefighters said the chunks from the driveway were where it had travelled under the driveway and struck the little tree. (I’m thinking the bolt up from the ground essentially came up in multiple branches, some of which exploded up from the driveway).
Then, when I was in high school, living in a different house, I was standing at the kitchen window and saw lightning strike a light pole in the middle of our property, probably 50 feet away. It was a wooden telephone pole, and chunks of it were blown out from it. I must have been a little dazed, because I walked outside and was looking at it, before I realized what I was doing – standing next to a pole that just got hit by lightning, in a thunderstorm. I ran back inside. No other damage that time.
Similar story but I was an adult visiting my parents place in southern Virginia and it was more like sixty feet. We were inside looking out at the storm and like others have recounted, you don’t really see a bolt, just a bright light everywhere followed by a greenish afterimage. I suppose the sound was a bit muffled as well, but you couldn’t tell by us. The tree was not only killed dead but toasted dry as well. It was cut up for free firewood with no delay for it to season.