Florida Highway Patrol have confirmed that a man died after being hit by lightning on I-95 Sunday.
45-year-old Benjamin Austin Lee of North Carolina was driving on the interstate in the Volusia County area when his helmet was struck and shattered, per a regional report from WFTV. Once struck, police said, Lee "veered off the road" and was ultimately thrown from the bike.
The lightning strike and subsequent crash were seen by an off-duty trooper and is now under investigation. In a tweet Sunday, Florida Highway Patrol shared a photo of the shattered helmet, for some reason. "Unfortunately he did not survive the crash," they said.
As we learned back in January via some stats unveiled at the American Meteorological Society's yearly get-together, Florida had the highest density of cloud-to-ground lightning flashes per square kilometer and per square mile in 2018. Additionally, per WCTV, the state showed the second-most cloud-to-ground strikes in the U.S. during the same time period.
Things aren't entirely dire, however, as those same stats showed an overall reduction of 11 percent in comparison to the 10-year average for the state. All told, lightning caused the deaths of 47 people between 2008 and 2017, a number higher than every other state.
