Swimmer Missing After Freak Lightning Storm Strikes 10 on Venice Beach

By HANS LAETZ
City News Service

Ten people were hit by lightning, and at least one needed CPR, as an unusual summer beach thunderstorm spread danger from Catalina Island to the shores of Santa Monica Bay today.

Witnesses said the Coast Guard was helping search the popular beach, as at least one person believed to be in the water was still unaccounted for two hours after the thunderstorm moved through. And photos of a stricken diver being worked on by paramedics on the beach surfaced on social media.

City fire paramedics set up a triage and treatment center on the crowded beach near Washington Boulevard, and one patient was rushed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

Two of the victims were critically hurt, city fire spokeswoman Katherine Mann said. The other 8 had lesser injuries, with one hospitalized for panic.

Eight adults and a 15-year-old youth were hurt on the beach, but reports of a swimmer hurt in the water and picked up by a Baywatch boat were struck down by the county fire department. County Baywatch crews were on scene, but it was not immediately clear if they treated anyone.

Also hit by lightning from the same storm, but 90 minutes earlier, was a 57-year-old man struck by lightning on a golf course at Avalon, on Santa Catalina Island.

Minor flooding hit Avalon, and at least two brush fires broke out on Catalina Island as a thunderstorm hit there at midday today, and then moved north over the Santa Monica Bay coast.

“At 12:55 p.m., Doppler radar indicated a line of thunderstorms between the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina, producing locally-heavy rainfall,” the NWS said. “This line of storms was drifting to the northwest at around 10 miles per hour.”

The small number of Los Angeles County firefighters and deputies on the island were scrambling with several simultaneous emergencies at and near Avalon, according to Sgt. Robert Berardi.

The Avalon lightning strike victim was preliminarily identified as a 57- year-old man, who was struck on a golf course. The extent of his injuries was not available from the hard-pressed sheriff’s substation.

Two brushfires from lightning strikes were confirmed in the bone-dry backcounty, “and a couple more were popping up” as the storm moved northwest across the island, Berardi said. They were all put out quickly.

The thunderstorm had earlier drenched the San Diego coast, and struck Santa Catalina Island at 12:45 p.m. today.

The National Weather Service issued a special marine weather advisory, warning of thunder, lightning, hail and possibly sudden choppy waves.

Thunderstorms are unusual along the coast, NWS officials have said, because the ocean tends to cool the thermal dynamics required for such storms.

The storm dissipated as it moved northwest, up the coast.

Patch file photo.

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