Dealing with Lightning

Many people have survived lightning hits (and many haven't), so a car should be decent protection.

The hits were about a football field away. I was driving at the time, though not very fast due to high winds. The rain itself was minimal. In the high desert, the lightning is usually dry. Tumble weeds were flying across the road and animals were doing the same (self powered, not wind powered). This was on route 375 in Nevada, a very straight road where I was driving, so I could take in the scenery.

Have fun checking this out:

I lived in a wood frame house when, one night while I was asleep, we had a *really* close lightning hit. When I woke up all the fluorescent lights in the house were glowing.

Years ago I saw a LandRover that had half the upper structure replaced with plywood and scrap metal. There was a laminated news story in the window indicating that the car had taken a direct lightning hit while being driven and the driver survived.

I stayed in a fire tower for a week a couple of summers ago. The stories of the place included lots cases of either very brave or very gullible forest rangers taking the engineer's word that the 4-corner grounding / strapping system was up to the task of dissipating a direct hit. Nobody ever got killed, but quite a few folks woke up on the floor wondering what happened. Many more told stories of glowing plasma momentarily trapped between the stovepipe and the wall. When a storm moved in and lightning got closer I couldn't decide between hiding in the car, the tower or the wooden ranger's hut. I was leaning towards the car but I'm still not sure that would have been the best choice.

-wolfgang

Which reminds me. In the 80s I had an office window that was a front-row seat for the mast on NYC's Empire State Building. Every time we had an electrical storm we kicked back and watched the lightning show.

I managed a datacenter and we were close enough that due to the radio fields our mainframes required extra-special care for grounding and we would have put gold foil on the windows in building management allowed it.

Years earlier I managed computers in the ESB's sub-basement and you'd never know we were getting lightning hits, sometimes daily. Of course we couldn't get the slightest FM or TV signal from the antennas, just