I had posed the question to a storm chasing group a number of years ago if any of them had photos of or had seen lighting strike a road, i.e., pavement? No one had or had seen. And I worked from the assumption, though as powerful as lightning is that there was something about pavement that maybe deterred lightning strikes.
That was until I had close encounters with it striking ground and water. My theory was that with the heat of lightning, as it is, that it would cause a crater of some kind in the ground and that it would vaporize water. Having experience both in very close proximity I can say that it does not, at least in the ground. With regards to the water, there is no violent explosion from the heat of the strike, which I found VERY odd.
Nonetheless it appears that the strike in the news story perhaps traveled along the water on the surface of the parking lot to the guy gassing up. Which is not uncommon. There have been instances of multiple people struck from a single strike before for similar reasons.
