Thursday, July 2, 2009

The iPod's best app: Device saves teen girl, 14, from lightning strike


This iPod saved its owner from shuffling into the Great Beyond.

Sophie Frost, 14, survived a lightning strike this week when the wires in her headphones steered the potentially lethal voltage away from her vital organs, British doctors said.

She was left with a nasty burn running the length of her torso as the electricity took the fastest route to the ground - through the headphones hanging from her neck.

The British teen received the iPod as a gift from her grandmother just four days before the lightning zapped her and boyfriend Mason Billington beneath a tree in a park in Essex, east of London.

"I don't remember any of it," Frost told the BBC. "Apparently, Mason has told me I was slightly awake for some of it.

"It's just all kind of blurry. And it's - gradually, I can (recall) more of it. Most of it's all blurred."

The couple was in the park last Monday when the thunderstorm struck. They wrapped their arms around each other - and then suffered the jolt of their young lives.

The teen-aged pair was knocked flat on the ground, their shirts singed down the front by the ferocious bolt. Frost - who was struck first - suffered a perforated ear drum and some minor eye damage along with her burns.

"The wind got knocked out of me, and I can't say anything," Billington, also 14, told the BBC. "I was coming around, just trying to speak to Sophie ... (She) couldn't stand up at all."

The life-saving iPod was obliterated.

"The plastic's been melted, it's all been completely destroyed, completely ruined," Frost said.

source....

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