Terrified woman misses being struck by LIGHTNING by just a few feet while running inside during storm

By LAURA PARNABY, US SENIOR NEWS REPORTER Published: 20:13, 17 July 2026 | Updated: 20:13, 17 July 2026 Astonishing footage has caught the moment a Florida mom narrowly missed being struck by lightning as she ran to shelter during a thunderstorm.  Ring doorbell video shows Jessika Gonzalez unloading her car as a series of bright strikes punctured the sky on June 27.  She slammed the car door before running to the house, just as lightning appeared to strike meters away from her.  'I felt like a firecracker was lit next to me and the sparks were hitting me,' Gonzalez told Storyful. 'I ran into the garage, shocked, and all the kids were screaming.' Gonzalez was not injured, and it appears her home was also somehow unscathed.  It comes as more severe weather is on the way for large swathes of the US.  Widespread life-threatening flash and urban flood warnings are in place for south-central Texas, prompting mass evacuations and road closures.  Wildfire smoke is also impacting air quality across much of the Great Lakes region into southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).  Astonishing footage has caught the moment a Florida mom narrowly missed being struck by lightning as she ran for shelter during a storm. She is pictured running away from the strike  Ring doorbell video shows Jessika Gonzalez unloading her car as a series of bright strikes punctured the sky on June 27, when Florida was pummeled by thunderstorms  NWS meteorologists warned that 'monsoonal thunderstorms may produce isolated to scattered flash flooding across the Southwest into the Great Basin.' The adverse conditions are already wreaking havoc.   In Texas, the Guadalupe River turned blood-red on Thursday after a construction company was hit by a wave of floodwater and crimson dye from the building seeped into the cascade.  A viral social media video showed a structure being submerged by water containing large amounts of a red fluid. The building was quickly identified as the headquarters of Pavement Restoration Inc - a business specializing in asphalt pavement preservation.  Many comments suspected the liquid to be red-dyed diesel, but Rob Wiggins - the president of Pavement Restoration - told the Daily Mail that it was a red dye used in some of their products. Weather experts have said the intense smoke with create vivid sunrises and sunsets this week, like one seen in New York Friday morning Meanwhile, millions of people in the US remain under dire air quality warnings as wildfire smoke from Canada makes breathing more hazardous than smoking a dozen cigarettes a day. The situation has deteriorated to the point where major metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Detroit, Washington and New York, were ranked as the worst polluted cities in the world on Friday. The NWS has issued air quality alerts in 16 states, stretching from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois in the Upper Midwest to New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia along the East Coast. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the air is now considered 'hazardous' from northern Minnesota to Columbus, Ohio - the agency's most severe air quality rating. Pictured: The New York City skyline shrouded in wildfire smoke on July 17 Your browser does not support iframes. Officials with the NWS urged anyone in areas where the air quality has reached these levels to 'avoid all physical activity outdoors.' The wildfire smoke pouring down from hundreds of forest fires in Canada, mainly in the province of Ontario, is filled with microscopic pollutants called fine particulate matter, or PM2.5. These are toxic compounds typically created by burning wood or industrial pollution, which are small enough to penetrate human tissue and cause severe breathing issues or even death among people with heart and lung disease. Health officials have noted that breathing in PM2.5 in the amounts currently seen in Detroit on Friday equates to smoking more than 13 cigarettes in a single day.