It’s a humid, summer late afternoon, the
butterflies cease flittering and land. They fold their wings
for the day and seek the refuge of the taller grass. At the
same time, a sudden hush of bird sounds seems harshly loud in the
silence. The air smells pure, ionized... slightly stinging the
nostrils; a powerful menace appears in the darkness in the form of
an upward rising thunderhead off to the west.
It’s time to retreat. Gather the dogs, put
away the tools and get inside. The first roll of distant
thunder announces itself and is almost always followed by a second
and closer one. The storm quickly advances electrifying the
formerly peaceful summer afternoon. And in my house, it’s
always the same: I’ll hold onto Snoball, the youngest of the dogs
and always the most terrified. We’ll rock back and forth on
the rocker as I stroke her calmly, whispering softly over and
over:
"All is OK,
And all is well...
It’s the big bulls in
heaven,
Stampeding to their
dinner bell. "
Together, in the growing darkness we watch the
lightning fork it’s way across the steel gray sky, flinching with
each crash of thunder, blinking with every bolt of lightning.
I believe that Snoball wonders the same as I wonder... Her
widened blue eyes ask, “Are we safe? Can you do something to make us
safer?”
Those frightened blue eyes tell me that it’s time
to face the danger. To learn what lightning is all about and
proceed to maximize our safety.
Some Facts and
Stats
The National Weather Service records about 25
million cloud-to-ground lightning events each year. One
hundred million volts, fifty thousand degrees and sometimes over
five miles long, certainly, lightning is not something to trifle
with. Each bolt contains enough energy to power the Unites
States for about 15 minutes. On average, about 160 people are
killed each year by lightning and almost ten times that are
injured. Over ten thousand forest fires in the U.S. are blamed
on lightning each year and billions of dollars lost in crop damage
due to hail and wind are associated with severest of
thunderstorms.
With 25 million lightning hits a year, it seems
logical to ask: what are my chances of being struck? The answer, of
course, depends heavily on your location and circumstances during
and shortly after the storm as we will see later. Even so,
most of us are somewhat blithe about the appearance of a
thunderstorm on the horizon, after all, we’ve seen so many summers,
so many thunderstorms; we’ve lived through each and every one of
them and haven’t been hit yet. Many of us, myself included,
have not even seen an up-close and scarier-than-hell lightning
strike other than on TV or the big screen.
Lightning blasé is like working with dangerous
chemicals every day, you build up a good history of accident-free
safe handling episodes and then, over time, you lose the respect you
should have for the danger. Then wham! It strikes without
warning and you lose a finger, a lung or an eye to a split second
turn of events that could have been avoided. This is the
nature of the unpredictable, chaotic danger of lightning, this stuff
happens, and it could happen to you.
So, what is the chance of being lightning struck?
A paper published by Orville and Huffines in 2001 in the Monthly
Weather Review calculated the statistical likelihood of an
individual being killed or injured by lightning in any given
year. They found that there is a 1 in 240,000 chance that you
will be struck; that’s about equivalent to one out of every quarter
million people will endure such a calamity. Well, that’s not
an exceedingly likely threat, but over a life span of eighty years,
that probability increases to 1 in 3000 over your lifetime.
Taking this one step further, suppose that you have an inner circle
of 10 family members, including the extended family and/or in-laws,
or even animals (although this data is uncorrected for the typically
shorter life span of pets). Now, according to Orville
and Huffines, you are looking at a 1 in 300 chance of someone in
your family (or animal) suffering a lightning related injury in your
lifetime. Here, I begin to feel the clammy breath of
annihilation knocking at my door. This is bringing the danger
too close to home to ignore.
Still, there are some things we can do to
manipulate the odds in our favor and enhance our safety. But
first let’s take a look at how thunderstorms are created and how and
why they produce lightning. Knowledge is often the key to
releasing fear’s nasty grip on our everyday life.
The Thunderhead
Most, but not all lightning is
associated with thunderstorms. Volcanoes, intense forest
fires, nuclear detonations, even severe snowstorms and sandstorms
can and do produce lightning. But the lion’s share of what we
endure in North America stems from thunderstorms. So it is
this I will focus on.
There are three key elements required to produce
a thunderstorm:
And for lightning, add
one more key ingredient:
