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Lightning!

by Chris Devaney   

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:

• Moisture laden warm air

• Atmospheric instability

• Upper atmosphere disturbance

And for lightning, add one more key ingredient:

• Ice

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