Caught on camera: Lightning hits truck in Lee County

Lightning hit a truck in Southwest Florida and it was caught on camera.

The moment lightning hit Jack Foraker’s 2020 Ford Ranger was pretty scary. “Just sounded like a shotgun blast to the back of my truck. And then yeah, it was. It was pretty scary.”

He said it happened June 26th at about 2:30 p.m. while he was on his way home to Estero from work. Foraker was approaching Big Carlos Pass in Lee County.

“I saw a few people that were just stragglers leaving the beach. And I said to myself, those are the type of people who get hit by lightning because they’re just leaving too late, and continued going. Turns out, they weren’t the people that got hit by lightning, I was.”

One lightning strike and he was out. “God singled me out and said, ‘I’m going to hit that guy right in the middle.’ And when I first got hit, it was like an explosion going off.”

The single strike was enough to stop his brand new truck from working. “My windshield wiper stopped, lost my power brakes, lost my power steering.”

The video shows pieces of the truck flying off after the lightning strike. “Pretty much put my truck in intensive care.”

The driver’s dashcam video catches the moment his truck begins to malfunction. “My brakes don’t work. And you know, it’s… it’s scary for that brief second, but at the same time, you’re ‘alright, just maintain control, get it off the road.’ That’s all you can do,” he said.

Then, the truck fried from the inside out. “In hindsight, yeah, you get you’re… you’re happy that you know, you’re still walking and still talking. But I had a brand new truck that I really liked. And, and, you know, it is what it is. In hindsight, yeah, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Foraker wants everyone to take lightning seriously. “You’re not to be afraid of the sharks, you don’t have to be afraid of the stingrays. You’re going to be afraid of lightning because it kills people here.”

Foraker said he had 4,000 miles on his Ranger and it had been in the shop for more than 40 days. He says now he’s going to buy a new truck.