It all started as another average day for drivers in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk — cloudy skies, pouring rain and a stream of traffic — until a double burst of lightning broke through the sky and landed inches away from a Toyota Rav4.
“It happened so quickly,” Galina Ershova, who recorded video of the double blast, said.
Dashcam footage that Ershova published on VKontakte shows two bright flashes of lightning strike the highway, paralyzing the car ahead.
“I was blinded for a second and I grabbed the steering wheel with a death grip,” Ershova, 41, told The Siberian Times news website.
Despite its close encounter with lightning, the vehicle didn’t explode or catch fire.
“The car didn’t catch fire and just made an emergency stop,” Ershova explained.
The bolts of lightning barely missed the car, striking the ground a half a meter away from the wheels, the local Nsknews.info news website reported. The car’s rear windshield, which took most of the impact, was merely cracked.
The driver of the Toyota, identified by The Siberian Times as a woman named Anna, said neither she nor the other passengers in her car were injured.
“I read the comments [online] and I can say one thing: There were a lot of eyewitnesses, but no one stopped,” she told the news website.
So perhaps the incident is a lesson in looking out for your fellow drivers as much as it is a lesson in driving safely during a storm.
