A 40-year-old woman was walking on a sidewalk about 5 p.m. just north of Fontana's downtown Metrolink station when two lightning bolts came down Wednesday afternoon, police and witnesses said.
One struck a large tree the woman was under, burning the bark and entering her near the left shoulder. The lightning's force scattered parts of her clothing up to 30 feet away and left burns down to the soles of her shoes.
The woman's name was not released, pending family notification. Her death was likely instantaneous, said Fontana police Sgt. Jeff Decker, the department's spokesman.
According to the National Weather Service the odds of being struck by lightning in any one year are 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in Southern California are probably worse than the odds of winning the lottery because it's so rare to have thunderstorms in this area. It takes a unique set of circumstances to generate a thunderstorm, and those ingredients are not usually present here all at the same time.
I remember a trip to Colorado in 1985 for a family reunion. We spent one day in Breckinridge and my cousin and I decided to rent mopeds and ride the trail out of town. We got about halfway through the trip and a thunderstorm came up. Being a Californian and not that familiar with proper lightning etiquette, and also not wanting to get soaked, we parked the bikes and headed for the nearest cover - a group of trees out in an open field.
Major league dumb.
It finally occurred to me that I was standing in the one place where lightning was probably most likely to hit, and it would be better to be wet than fried, so we headed back to bikes and laid low until the storm passed. We got pretty wet, but lived to tell the story.
Storms are possible again tomorrow. I'm staying away from the trees.
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