- July 7, 2026
Volusia County lifeguard Damien Curry wasn't planning to work on the Fourth of July.
But Friday, July 3, was a grueling day on the beach. Lifeguards performed over 200 rescues. Two people — a 60-year-old Daytona Beach man and a 17-year-old boy from Orlando — drowned. Curry spent hours in the surf looking for the deceased teenager, who was found in the morning of July 4.
"It was just an intense day, and I don't work that much anymore, so I was like, 'I'll see what I can do coming in on the Fourth, and I'll leave at 3 p.m.," Curry said. "That was my plan."
Then he was struck by lightning — and lived to tell the tale.
Curry, a landscaping business owner who is running for Ormond Beach mayor, was working at Al Weeks Sr. North Shore Park in Ormond-by-the-Sea when a call came in around the early afternoon requesting aid at the Seminole Avenue beach approach. A blind woman was having issues getting her wheelchair off the beach, so Curry drove down.
As he arrived, a red light alert came over the radio, instructing lifeguards to clear the beach due to lightning.
"I get out of the truck to go around it to the passenger side to clear the backpack and the fins I have sitting in the passenger's seat, and that's just when the flash and the bang and the boom and everything happened," Curry said. "I got hit and I got lifted off my feet."
He felt the current through the left side of his body, as his left arm had been resting on his truck.
"I was just in shock," Curry said. "I couldn't believe what happened. I thought someone died ... I couldn't believe I was alive."
Following the lightning strike, Curry was able to help others off the beach, including the blind woman whose call he had responded to. When he got into his truck, Curry said he was shaking.
"My heart was racing," he recalled. "My whole left side was pins and needles, tingling, and pain on the left side. My ears were ringing. I mean, it was like I was in a car crash."
Curry was evaluated by paramedics and later evaluated at the hospital, where he was released after about six hours.
He said he's lucky to be alive.
"It's like being given a second chance," he said. "That's the biggest thing. You're never guaranteed another day. It can be all taken away from you so fast, and you can do everything right, and be in the right place and doing the right thing, being a good person, and still God can come and strike you and there's nothing you can do about it."
