The holiday weekend’s most dangerous flashes in Florida didn’t come from fireworks.
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Lightning strikes killed a man in Fort Myers and injured at least five other people — including two in Central Florida — across Florida during the July Fourth weekend, according to the National Lightning Safety Council. The injured included a deputy in Seminole County and a lifeguard in Volusia County.
A fire that broke out in an apartment complex near Windermere on Sunday may have been started by a lightning strike as well.
Weekend thunderstorms unleashed roughly 125,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes across the state, the lightning council said. A lightning strike contains several strokes.
But the weekend’s weather pattern wasn’t unusual, said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and lightning data specialist with the council.
“It was a typical summer in Florida,” Vagasky said. “June, July and August are the peak of lightning activity.”
What made the weekend dangerous was the combination of widespread thunderstorms and large holiday crowds outdoors, Vagasky said. Florida remained the “lightning capital” of the U.S. until 2025 and is now second to Oklahoma, according to the environmental consulting firm AEM.
Nearly 90% of people struck by lightning survive, Vagasky said, but there is still no safe place outside during a thunderstorm.
“When thunder roars, go indoors,” he said.
Lightning injured a Volusia County Beach Safety lifeguard who was helping move beachgoers from the shore during a storm on the Fourth in Ormond Beach. Damien Curry, 26, was trying to clear the passenger seat of his patrol truck to give a blind woman a ride off the beach when a bolt hit.
“The strike hits the truck, goes through the left side of my body,” Curry said in a telephone interview Monday. “It lifts me off my feet and I jump through the truck. I landed in the driver’s seat.”
Despite being injured, Curry said he continued helping evacuate people from the beach immediately after the strike. He recalled screaming to beachgoers over his truck’s public address system. He got the woman in the truck, dropped her off and made it to the station to hand in his keys for the day, he said, where paramedics checked him.
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Curry said he experienced pain and a pins-and-needles sensation along the left side of his body before being transported to a hospital. He said the physical symptoms subsided within hours, but now he feels panicked when storms form.
“I’m definitely worried now,” he said. “I didn’t really have any worry ever, but now when storms come in, I’m getting out of here. I worry for all my friends that are deputies and firefighters and lifeguards. I just can’t stop thinking about them out there working every day.”
When asked if he’d be returning to shifts, Curry said it’s “up in the air.” But his wife’s views seem clear. She wrote on their fridge whiteboard: “No more lifeguarding.”
A Seminole County sheriff’s deputy was hospitalized Sunday after being indirectly struck while touching a gate near Geneva. The deputy was conscious and alert when he was taken to a hospital as a precaution. He was released a short time later and is doing well, according to a spokesperson who detailed the incident in an email Monday. The sheriff’s office is not releasing the deputy’s name or information.
Viktar Kiryk, 51, a Florida resident, was swimming off Fort Myers Beach on Friday afternoon with family members when he was struck by lightning. Bystanders performed CPR and used a defibrillator before emergency crews arrived, but Kiryk was pronounced dead on the beach just after 2 p.m., according to a Lee County Sheriff’s Office incident report.
His wife, daughter and son-in-law were hospitalized. They were in stable condition Saturday, according to a sheriff’s office Facebook post.
Kiryk’s death was the third lightning fatality in the United States this year, with the second occurring in May in Florida’s Santa Rosa County. Florida led the nation in lightning deaths from 2016 to 2025 with 51, the council reported, with more than double that of second-place Texas.
Storms on Sunday also may have ignited a fire at the Buena Vista Place Apartments near Windermere, that left 10 units uninhabitable and 21 residents displaced, Orange County Fire Rescue spokesperson Nicole Griffin wrote in an email Monday.
A resident was injured while rescuing a pet but declined transport to a hospital, Griffin wrote. A firefighter was treated for heat exhaustion.
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