By O’Ryan Johnson and Jessica Fargen
Boston Herald
DORCHESTER, Mass. — EMTs and paramedics this morning described the chaotic scene they encountered after they drove through a booming thunderstorm to treat 10 people who were injured during a freak lightning strike near a soccer field yesterday.
“You could see people laid out on the sidewalk, on the ground,” said Bill DeYoung, one of the first Boston EMTs to arrive yesterday afternoon at Franklin Field, where blinding rain scuttled an intense soccer game.
“One patient was unconscious in cardiac arrest. We saw burns,” he said. “Patients said they couldn’t move. Their legs were numb. The conditions were very bad.”
The soccer players and spectators had gathered underneath a tall tree to seek shelter from the whipping rain as cracks of thunder reverberated and lightning lit up the sky.
Seven of the 10 people injured during the lightning strike are still in the hospital, including one man who went into cardiac arrest and is considered the most critical of the group. At least four of the patients are in intensive care, said Rich Serino, chief of Boston Emergency Medical Service.
The patients were taken to five hospitals.
According to Serino:
Four people, aged 19 to 39, were taken to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. One has been discharged and a 39-year-old man is in intensive care there.
Three people, aged 23 to 44, were taken to Boston Medical Center. All are in intensive care.
A 13-year-old boy taken to Children’s Hospital is in good condition.
A man taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was treated and released.
The 10th person received minor injuries and accompanied the minor child to Children’s Hospital.
DeYoung said one patient had no memory of being struck - at least three of the 10 were unconscious when he arrived.
EMTs praised bystanders who called 911 and worked as a team with responders, despite the wild weather.
“There was a lot of soccer players carrying patients towards us,” said Stan Majorowski, 24, an EMT who has been on the job for just one month. “It was frantic. It was really loud. There were a lot of people screaming. ... It’s not something that I’m going to get out of my head soon.”
Once inside ambulance, paramedic Roger Aeillo discovered two of his three patients didn’t speak English. One was bilingual and translated.
“They all described the same feeling,” he said. “They all had the same complaint - you feel like you’ve been shocked.”
Several witnesses yesterday described a scene of chaos after the tree was struck.
Hector Rivera of Boston, an Air Force reservist, said he sprang into action to help move victims tossed by the strike to safety.
“People were falling like bricks,” Rivera said. “It looked like a movie scene. We kept hearing thunder. You could hear people crying.”
He said he and another man picked up and moved two men about 40 feet from near the tree to the sidewalk.
“I was just trying to keep his head and back elevated,” he said of the victim. “The rain was coming down so hard he could have drowned.”
The National Weather Service in Taunton said .98 of an inch fell on Boston in less than an hour, a significant amount of water fall that prompted sudden street flooding and blinding driving conditions.
“Just getting there was a significant issue . . . I lost complete visibility a couple of times on Blue Hill Ave., just trying to respond to the scene,” said Boston Emergency Medical Service Deputy Superintendent Michael Bosse, one of the first responders to reach the scene. “When I got out of my vehicle, I stepped into 2 feet of water and on top of that it was still pouring and thundering and lightning around us while we were out there working.”
Rivera said if officials had called the Salvadoran League’s regular Sunday game when the rain struck, dozens more people would have huddled beneath the tree. By continuing to play, he said they averted a larger disaster.
A witness who identified himself as Elias said he was standing under the tree beside Cruz Garay, 44, who leaned against it. Both men watched as soccer players struggled to finish out the game in the deluge when the lightning hit.
“I (saw) the light,” Elias said. “It was very, very, very bright, very loud ‘bu-boom.’ All the people were tossed as if they were a bucket of water. My heart is still beating (fast).”
Garay went down with a heart attack, according to his brother Nelson Garay, who sat at the scene afterward, shaken after seeing his older brother struck.
Angela Rowlings and Jessica Van Sack contributed to this report.