for kids and adults

I often get asked about lightning safety. There are several reasons why people ask me. One is because I spend so much time out in the middle of storms. Another is because I have worked in the safety field for almost thirty years. I taught driver education at the high school and college levels for about ten years. Then I became the Safety Coordinator for the City of Tucson. This experience has taught me a lot about safety.

Along the way life has taught me some other lessons which can be applied to safety, as well. For instance, I have learned that there are things that you can do something about, and there are things that you can't change. For example, you can make a lot of difference in how you live your life and what your future holds by the way you behave and the kind of education you acquire. On the other hand, you can't do a lot about the genetic hand you are dealt in life, not yet, anyway.

In the world of safety there are risks that you can do a lot about and others that you can't effect so much. One of the tricks to being safe as you go through life is take action where you can be effective and not worry too much about those risks you can't do much about. For instance, you can wear a helmet when you ride your bike. You might still crash and get some road rash, or break an arm or leg or something. But you've greatly reduced the chances of a serious head injury. A broken arm can mess up your life for a while, but you can live with it. A broken brain box is a different matter all together.

So what's all this got to do with lightning and storm safety? Well, there are some things that you can easily do to protect yourself from the effects of weather. And there are some weather effects that you may not be able to do much about. Once again, the trick is knowing the difference between the two.

Lightning is a good example of a weather effect that you can't 100% protect yourself against. One reason is that it is a complex phenomena that we don't fully understand. What you don't understand, you can't readily control. Another reason we can't 100% protect ourselves against lightning is its power. It pretty much goes where it wants. Unless you are willing to spend your entire life inside a Faraday cage, you're at risk because that's the only place we know of that it can't go.

You might feel safe from lightning inside your home during a storm, but about 20% of the people killed each year by lightning are inside a building when they get struck. It comes in through electrical circuits, along water pipes, down chimneys, over phone lines. Sometimes it doesn't kill people by electric shock, but by setting their house on fire. Even a house with a well-designed, properly installed, and correctly maintained lightning rod system is only 90-95% protected.

Large structures with steel framework, like high-rise downtown office buildings, are pretty safe, but you probably still need to stay off the phone and away from the plumbing. On the other hand, sun or rain shelters, like park ramadas, are bad places to be during thunderstorms.

Since there aren't a lot of actual Faraday cages lying around, an all-metal car makes a good makeshift Faraday cage in a pinch. Soft top convertibles or Fiberglas-roofed utility vehicles won't work. Some people think that it is the car's rubber tires that provide the protection, but it isn't. Think about it. This big electric arc can jump an air gap that is miles across! It isn't about to be stopped by an inch or so of rubber. If that worked, your sneaker soles would provide you protection while walking in the open, but they don't.

What happens when a bolt strikes a Faraday cage, or an all-metal car, is that the current spreads out across the conductive metal surfaces and eventually passes to the ground, either through the tires or over their wet surface. As long as you aren't in contact with the car body, you're protected from the electrical current. You may get some hearing damage from the thunderclap, or your eyes might get a retinal after-image that stays with you for hours,; but your body will be left relatively unscathed

Let's digress a moment and talk about those rubber tires. They're actually not just rubber, but a combination a fabric plies and rubber combined in a mold by a high temperature process called vulcanizing. Now, what heat puts together, heat takes apart. So if your car gets hit by lightning, and the current travels to ground through the tires, they may pop or may just partially delaminate. If they only suffer delimitation damage, you may drive off on them, only to have them blow out later on as you're driving down the road. There's another way the lightning's effect could hurt you.

An acquaintance once told me about how his brother was killed by lightning as he was driving down a highway on his motorcycle. The bolt struck him in the head and exited the motorcycle where the tires were touching the pavement. He said both tires were blown out and there were holes blown in the asphalt pavement, too. Why not, the pavement, like the tires, is made by a heat process.

So, are there other ways to reduce the chances of being struck by lightning? Sure there are. What are the odds, anyway? We haven't really talked about that yet. We're not exactly sure how many people are "struck" by lightning. The word "struck" means different things to different people. (Not, like, people with three eyes kind of different; just; you know, different.) Maybe we could agree that we will use the term "struck" to mean physically affected by lightning. There can be mental and emotional effects, as well, but we will ignore these for now.

There are four common ways that lightning can physically effect people or other animals. These are:

1. Direct Strike -- this is where the lightning bolt comes down and hits you, say, in the head and then travels down through the core of your body, probably along your salty vascular system, and out through the soles of your feet to ground. This almost always kills you. If your body is wet or has a lot of metal objects on its surface, the current may travel along the outside surface of your body, producing painful, but survivable burns.
   

   A similar effect occurs when a tree gets hit. The current may travel through the wet sapwood on its way to ground. If it does, it usually turns the sap to steam and the resulting pressure inside the tree causes it to explode violently, bursting the tree into many fragments. If someone is standing nearby, they may be injured or even killed by the flying wood fragments. There's another way of being hurt by lightning other than by the direct effects of its current. On the other hand, if the tree is thoroughly wet on its surface, the lightning current may travel along the outside surface bark, often creating black, spiral burn marks on the bark, but not killing the tree.
   

2. Flashover or Side-Flash - occurs when lightning directly strikes a nearby object, such as a tree, and rather than going directly to ground, jumps out of the struck object and flashes over to a nearby object or person. The classic example of this is the person standing under a lone tree when the tree gets struck, but you could suffer a flashover from a flagpole or a pipe railing just as easily. Probably more people are killed by flashovers than by direct strikes.
   
3. Step Currents - occur when the lightning strikes the ground and then travels through it. As the current passes through the resistance of the earth it diminishes. If you are standing with your feet apart, which is likely during a windy thunderstorm, and one foot is touching the ground at a point that has a different electrical potential than where the other foot is, the difference in potential will cause the current to travel through your body, and very likely cause your heart to stop.
   

   Cattle, which have a wider distance between their feet than men do, are frequent victims of step currents. It is not uncommon to read about a number of cows being killed at one time by lightning. This is usually the effect of a step current, as opposed to a direct strike. On the other hand, you never read about smaller animals, like chipmunks, whose feet are close together, being killed en mass by a lightning storm.
   

   By the way, step current victims can almost always be revived by Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). Keep at it. Normal life signs are often absent in lightning victims even though they are still alive.
   

4. Touch Currents - is a term which can be used to describe physical effects from lightning which occur because you were touching an object when it was directly struck. Say you are standing at an overlook at the Grand Canyon and holding onto one of the pipe handrails which protect you from falling over the precipice. Lightning strikes the railing on the other end and travels through it to you, possibly stopping your heart, or maybe just causing all your muscles to contract violently, which can send you flying through the air.
   

Wow, we've come a long way from where we started - talking about the odds of getting hit. Let's get back to that. Let's answer an easier question, first. What are the odds of getting killed by lightning? We have better (not perfect) records of that. According to the National Safety Council, who keep track of things like this, somewhere between a low of around 70 and a high of around 120 people a year are killed in the United States by lightning. So, there are good years and bad years. That's out of a population that the U.S. Census Bureau, who keep track of things like population numbers, tells is around 265 million people. Around 100 people (I like nice round numbers) out of 265,000,000 - you have a better chance of winning your state lottery than being killed by lightning! Still, if you are one of the 100, it's a major bummer.

Since the numbers are so small, can you just ignore the danger? No. Many more people are injured than are killed. The long term effects can be painful and physically and/or mentally disabling. So much so that there is a national support group for the victims of lightning and other severe electrical shock.

Other weather-related phenomena can and do injure and kill, too. Floods, hurricanes and tornadoes quickly come to mind. Some of the most dramatic weather events are so scary that most people treat them with respect and make efforts to seek shelter or move out of their path if there is enough advance warning. Some are more sinister. Exposure is a physical effect of extreme temperatures. Out here in the desert, where we live, people often succumb to both the heat and the cold. Hyperthermia and dehydration kill lost hikers or motorists who break down and were unprepared to survive until rescued. It can hit 120° F in our summer months, and at those temperatures the heat can suck you dry as a prune in no time. Having plenty of water and some good shade is essential to survival.

You can get too cold out here in the summer, as well, strange as that may seem. Our mountains attract hikers and campers who want to escape the heat found on the desert floor. First time visitors to Tucson are often amazed to find that we have a ski lift here in town. Mt. Lemmon is some 9000 feet high and often gets enough snow to support skiing throughout our winter months, which are admittedly fewer than back in Vermont where we lived before moving here.

The temperature drops fast as night falls and if you are caught out in shorts and a tee shirt you can get in trouble with the cold. Winds in the mountains can add to the problem of hypothermia. Exposure from either heat or cold causes disorientation which compounds the problem of being lost. A cold rain can further the effects and quickly lead to severe results, including death. Dressing in layers and carrying sufficient food and water are a must out here and in many other parts of the country.

And while you're up there hiking in the mountains, watch out for that other weather phenomena that accompanies those mountain storms - lightning. Where lightning injuries are concerned, it used to be that one of the most at-risk groups in the country was farmers. there were a lot of them, they rode high up on open tractors, and often worked through storms trying to minimize damage and crop loss.

As the family farm has been nearly squeezed out of existence, economically, there are far fewer farmers around these days. Also, the tractor has evolved into a larger, full metal cab equipped machine with air conditioning. The full metal cab acts like a Faraday cage. Farmers, therefore, no longer comprise the highest segment of lightning-injured among Americans.

That dubious honor is fast falling to recreationists. Hikers, boaters, swimmers, campers, cyclists, golfers, etc. are often out in the open, exposed to the capriciousness of the most whimsical of all weather phenomena - lightning. These people are often out of touch with the communication systems that provide early warning. They are also often far from suitable shelter. The result is that they are becoming the leading group of victims.

There is some disagreement as to what the best strategy is to avoid being struck when caught out in the open. Contemporary wisdom for years held that you should avoid lone objects, such as trees, or high points, such as hill tops. This wisdom further concluded that you should seek out a low depression and crouch, not lie down.

Dr. N. Kitagawa, an atmospheric physicist in Japan, did a lengthy study on lightning victims in his country. He found that some people who were crouching during a storm were hit and killed, but found no one who was killed while lying down. What does this mean? It could mean that people are so thoroughly indoctrinated with the contemporary wisdom that no one was lying down. But probably not. There are few, if any, contemporary wisdoms that are universally adopted. Maybe there is something different about the terrain or the lightning in Japan.

It would be interesting to see lightning deaths broken down statistically by the mechanism of injury. For instance, if you are lying down, it seems logical that you would be more susceptible to injury from a step current. On the other hand, those crouching might be more at risk from a direct strike if their head were the high point in the surrounding landscape. The type of earth you were on would effect the electrical resistance encountered by lightning as it radiated out from its contact point. This would effect the likelihood of having two feet anchored to pieces of ground at differing electrical potentials - the step current hazard.

As you can see, there is a lot we don't know about all of this. Maybe you will be the one to study this phenomena and unlock some of its secrets.

Getting back to the hazards of weather, flooding is a big one. Flood waters do a lot of property damage, and out here in the desert we have floods, too. It seems strange that you would ever have floods in a desert, but we do. At times we have flooding problems without having any rain. The rain occurs up in the nearby mountains and runs down into the desert valley watercourses.

When these events happen quickly, they are called flash floods. An actual wall of water can come flowing down the streambed. Flash floods are very powerful. They will wash away anything in their path. Each year in Arizona we have motorists who try to cross these flowing waters where they cut across roads. These flooded wash crossing are very dangerous and many a motorist has lost their vehicle while attempting such a crossing. Some lost their lives, as well.

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