'Lucky' Lake Grove man survives lightning strike

With an intense thunderstorm moving in Monday night, Phil Colacioppo walked out of his Lake Grove home at about 9:20 to grab a few bags from the back of his van.

Just as he was heading back to the front door, something from above slammed him to the ground and he was momentarily paralyzed.

As he fell, Colacioppo said he heard "the loudest boom in my life.

"I thought I was dead," he said.

Colacioppo, 33, said he couldn't move for a few moments.

But he soon started to feel tingling in his arms and legs. He got to his feet and realized he had survived a lightning strike.

"He's very lucky," said Dr. Andrew Wackett, the attending physician in Stony Brook University Medical Center's emergency room when Colacioppo arrived. "If he had been a few feet to the left or to the right, he probably would have been dead."

Wackett said Colacioppo was likely standing a few feet away from where the lightning hit the ground. "So he was probably on the very periphery of the lightning strike," he said.

And Colacioppo's daily routine - he takes off his watch and wedding ring when he comes home everyday - likely saved him from metal burns, Wackett said.

Colacioppo's family had just returned from an overnight trip to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, and the bags he had gone to retrieve held clothes, toiletries and toys for Colacioppo's two children: Amber, 2, and Sarah, 10 months.

His wife, Janine, was watching their two daughters when she saw him run into the house after the strike, screaming. "But looking at him, he looked fine," she said. "While I'm on with 911, he took off his shirt."

Behind Colacioppo's left shoulder were red markings that resembled fern leaves - a phenomenon that Wackett called "ferning." "Electrons from the lightning sort of dance on your skin," causing the pattern, Wackett said.

Those marks faded Tuesday.

Stony Brook doctors ran tests on Colacioppo's heart and internal organs, and found no damage. "He was actually in pretty good shape when he made it into the emergency department," Wackett said.

Colacioppo, a vice president at a Melville online marketing firm, was discharged early Tuesday morning and was back home by 4 a.m., he said. Tuesday afternoon, Colacioppo and his wife stood in their driveway to tell the tale.

"I feel very thankful to God," said Janine Colacioppo, 34, who held a camcorder to tape her husband being interviewed, to show her students at Dickinson Avenue Elementary School in East Northport.

"And I said to him, it makes you realize life can change in a flash, literally."A spark of lightning can reach 50,000 degrees and 100 million electrical volts and cause injury or death.

The National Weather Service says lightning strikes kill about 10 percent of the people they hit.

In the last 30 years, the United States has averaged 58 reported lightning-related deaths a year, but the weather service says the actual number of deaths likely averages 70 or more a year. New York State reported seven lightning deaths between 2000 and 2009, according to a report prepared for the weather service.

The National Weather Service's local office in Upton couldn't immediately provide statistics on how many Long Islanders are hit by lightning every year. According to news reports, 12 people were injured in three separate accidents on Long Island in 2006 and 2008.