Facts first. This is what you are up against when you encounter lightning. I know the statistics say 1 in 700,000 people gets hit by lightning. About 400 people a year get hit. Some of those people have been hit more than once. If you’re one of the ones who gets hit, it doesn’t matter what the general odds are. For you, it’s just become a 1 in 1 chance of being hit.
Simplistically put, lightning is the electrical discharge between the positive and negative regions of a cloud formation or between clouds and ground.
On average, each flash of lightning carries 300 million volts, with currents ranging up to 20,000 amps. That’s just average range. Lightning can reach more than a billion volts and exceed 200,000 amps. It can reach temperatures as high as 54,000ºF. Water boils at a mere 212ºF and that’s plenty hot enough to cause serious burns.
There are about 25 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in the US each year, but it’s not evenly spread out. Florida has the most lightning strikes and Washington State the least. Even people in Washington state can be struck by lightning because all it takes is one flash and one person in the right place and the right time.
Thunderstorm season is approaching. I know, some of y'all are still buried under snow and ice, but the first day of Spring is tomorrow, and that means thunderstorm, lightning, and tornado season, with accompanying floods.
This diary is about surviving lightning.
There are things you can do to reduce your chances of being hit by lightning. There are things you do that can increase your chance of being hit by lightning – you need to stop doing those. And if you or someone near you gets hit by lightning, there are things you can do to survive or help the other person survive. If you are in the process of being struck by lightning, there’s not a lot you can do except wait it out – it’s fast, so you won’t have to wait long. Surviving lightning is a matter of prevention and after care.
If lightning is visible, it can strike you, so take precautions even if it’s not raining. You can be hit by lightning before and after the rain passes by. All you need to be struck by lightning is to have lightning happen when you are in a place where it can strike you. That’s pretty much anywhere outdoors and a few places indoors.
So, prevention first.
Things to do when lightning is visible:
Get indoors. The only safe place from lightning is inside a sturdy shelter, away from anything the lightning can reach through, like windows, doors, wiring, and plumbing.
Get under thick cover if you can’t get indoors – a large wooden pavilion, a cave, a deep overhang. Make sure it’s dry where you’re standing. A nearby lightning strike can travel through water to shock you. As powerful as lightning is, this may be enough to kill you.
Stay away from : edges, doors, windows, water, plumbing, ungrounded appliances, and electrical cords or lines. I know a man who was struck twice by lightning while on the toilet. He holds it now, no matter how badly he must go. He bought into the whole “lightning only strikes once” myth until he got hit the second time. He says he’s not a fool; he won’t get hit a third time.
If you can’t get indoors, get into a car with the windows rolled up and the vents closed. The tires don’t offer protection; the metal in the car conducts the current along the outside of it, away from the interior so long as the windows are rolled up and there are no drafts.
If you can’t get to good shelter or a car, run. Discard the umbrella, which makes you taller and thus could make you a target, and run. Movement may be the safest thing you can do in a lightning storm if you have no shelter.
Parents, make sure your child’s coach has a plan for lightning. If you’re at the meet or game with your child, insist on a time out and pull your child out of the game, field, or pool as soon as lightning is visible or at the hint of a thunderstorm. We take lightning seriously around here and the only time we cancel the OU Medieval Fair is lightning. Snow, ice, rain, even tornadoes, and the Fair stays open. but lightning will close us down.
Most outdoor fairs and festivals now have lightning plans. If volunteers and staff at the fairs start telling you the fair or festival is over or they start herding you to buildings, believe them and get to someplace safe. The building they are directing you to, a car, a bus, or someplace substantial has already been pre-determined to help save your life. Listen to them.
Things to not do:
Don’t lie flat on the ground. Ground-running lightning just gets a bigger and better target. There is no safe place or position in the open during lightning.
Don’t do the “lightning crouch” – squat balanced on the balls of your feet, ears covered, head down. You’re still a target for lightning if you are outdoors. If you stay in one place, you make yourself a better target.
Don’t stand under a tree. Trees get struck by lightning all the time, and if your tree gets struck, so will you. Secondary and associative lightning strikes are just as dangerous as primary ones. And need I say that if a tree gets hit by lightning, it will explode and even if you don't get struck with a secondary strike, you will get hit by debris?
Don’t stay outside at all if lightning is visible. If you’re outdoors, you’re a target for lightning. This includes sports games, swimming, playing in the playground or park, picnics, family reunions, or any other outdoor activity. Several golf players have been struck by lightning because they believed the myths about it – doing the “lightning crouch”, wanting to finish the hole they were on, sheltering under a tree. If there’s lightning visible, don’t be complacent about it. Lightning can strike without rain.
Things not to worry about:
Wearing metal. Metal will not attract lightning. It will make things worse if you get struck because metal will heat up quickly and burn you – remember lightning can reach up to 54,000ºF of heat; water boils at a mere 212ºF - but it will not make you a more likely target.
Touching people struck by lightning. Unless they are lying on a live electric cable, it’s perfectly safe to touch people after they’ve been struck by lightning. The human body is an excellent conductor of electricity, but it doesn’t store it at all. By the time the lightning strike is over, all the electricity is already out of their body. They are often in need of urgent medical care to restart their breathing or heart or to treat burns and should be tended immediately. Even if they weren’t visibly wounded, they will be in shock. They will need to be escorted or carried quickly to safety so you and they aren’t struck again. Touch them, reassure them, and help them. You won’t be hurt by helping them unless you stay out in the open.
Afterwards:
If you are hit by lightning, there’s not a lot you can do during the strike to minimize the effects. You’ll just have to endure it and hope you live through it. Only 10% of the people struck by lightning die from it, so your chances of surviving are pretty good. If you are among the 90% who live, and you’re conscious and mobile at all, seek shelter. You certainly don’t want to be hit again. If you were indoors when you were hit, move away from plumbing, cords, ungrounded appliances, doors and windows. If you’re breathing, you should recover.
Seek medical help as soon as possible. Lightning can damage lots of different parts of you. It can leave little black spots on your brain where it fried bits, and you can lose some functionality as a result of the brain damage. It can sear nerve channels, leaving you with chronic pain. It can do other things, and a doctor is the best place to go to determine what happened to you and how you will recover from it. You're alive, that means you have an excellent chance of overcoming any after-effects and damage caused by the strike.
If you’re not conscious or breathing, you’ll have to rely on others to help you.
If it’s a companion who was struck by lightning and is unconscious or not breathing, this is what you do:
If you have a cell phone, call 911.
If you’re in the open, get to shelter. Drive your car to the injured person and get them inside. Roll up the windows and shut the vents.
If they’re breathing, get them to medical care as soon as possible or wait for help to arrive.
If they’re not breathing and/or their heart’s not beating – you took CPR classes, right? Then get to it. Keep administering CPR until either they start breathing on their own or help arrives.
Many lightning victims suffer serious burns from the strike. They may have broken bones. Once they are breathing and their heart started again, you can worry about these things. Get them to professional medical care as soon as possible.
If you’ve been struck by lightning, you may face a long road to recovery. Perhaps you were only “splashed” by a near-by lightning strike and suffered shock. A complete recovery is possible. Or you could be facing months of burn treatments, paralysis, nerve damage, eye damage, hearing loss, brain injury, memory lapses, concentration lapses, chronic pain, hypersensitivity, or impaired thinking – or any combination of these. You will recover some, or possibly even most, of your functioning with time and care.
Your best bet is to avoid being struck by lightning. The odds are with you on this, and you can increase those odds by taking precautions. Don’t get cocky and think you can harvest one more row of beans or throw one more cast or score one more goal. If you see lightning and you can’t count all the way to 30 before you hear it, seek shelter. Better yet, if you see lightning, seek shelter anyway. Lightning can strike 10 miles or more away from its point of origin. Heat lightning is as dangerous as rain-accompanied lightning.
And if you can’t get to shelter, keep moving and hope lightning misses you.