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Posted on 01/11/2015 5:22:14 PM PST by Coleus
If your hair ever stands up, what sort of refuge might be advisable? Lower ground... close to rocks or structures ...in an open space?
Id say a better option is to take your chances picking a direction and run! I aint sticking around an area where my hair stands on end.
You may hear a sound similar to bacon frying,
Again hit the dirt!
Lightening, def. : a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.
I guess my hair would stand on end too, if I were struck by an uterus.
It’s lightning. Geez.
Have lost two transformers at my house to lightning strikes and have had the power knocked out upline many times.
One summer storm cell took out four power poles in a row on the highway about two miles away. The poles blew apart in their middles and looked like a grenade had been placed in each one.
Have seen a few identical double parallel cloud to ground strikes. One early morning while driving in to work in the 80s I saw an identical triple strike-—only one I’ve ever seen. That would have made a great photo.
The hair on my arm stood up in the middle of an athletic field as a storm rolled in one day back in college. I knew what it was and sprinted for the building.
The bolt came down about 300 yards away a few seconds later.
As a fellow electrician... Damn lol, that’s crazy.
Grow a beard. A long one.
Or you can grow a mustache. Panic when you start resembling Salvador Dali.
Lightning that has just gone miles through the air is not going to be deterred by the few feet you can jump, if it even manages to strike right at the peak of your jump.
The best possible position physiologically [but not in terms of physics]is curled up into a ball, which is why a crouch with ears covered is recommended.
Covering your ears will keep the inrush of air into the vacuum created by the heat of the lightning strike from bursting your eardrums [maybe].
The reason crouching is better, even though your head is still at slightly higher potential than it would be lying down is this: electrostatic charges tend to [mostly] skim the surfaces of conductors and dielectric materials [actually, they skim the surfaces of conductors completely.]
By balling up into a ball-like shape, are trying to keep your core organs, especially your heart, as far away from the lightning strike and heat as possible, and keep the charge on the outside surface of your body.
Not really.
Cows and other four-legged animals are more sensitive to all forms of potential difference than humans because they have skinny legs which end in a very narrow hoof. This is why an electric fence [which involves no electric field anywhere similar to lightning] can deter a one-ton bull, while causing only minor discomfort [comparatively speaking] to a human. It's also why low-voltage/low amperage induction currents cause milk loss in cows while humans working in their barns are completely unaware of the induction.
An correction gravid with pique.
Anyoine that has played around in HS physics class with iron filings and magnetic fields knows how sharp points concentrate the field.
Simple: Do not stand up and offer yourself as an electrode. Let the tree or idiot (preferrably democrat) standing near you do it.
There is a very good reason buildings in lightning rich areas have lighting rods on top of them. Give the charge an inviting path and it will likely take it.
minutes? or seconds?
Close, but not quite right. Lightning is caused by an electric charge which builds up in rain clouds under the correct conditions. One necessary condition is the formation of hail within the cloud, near the top where it is held by powerful updrafts. Water condenses on the hail particles, freezes causing the hail to get heavier and fall. As the hail drops it encounters warmer air which melts some ice from the particle. When enough is melted the updraft mill cause the lightened ice to return to the cloud top.
This lifting and dropping acts to separate static electricity (generated by the turbulent up & down drafts) into positive and negative areas at the top and bottom of the thunder head cloud. Electric charges of the same polarity repel each other, thus the bottom of the cloud is evenly covered with charged particles of the same polarity.
As the surface winds move the clouds sideways relative to the earth, the charged bottom (which may be several acres in extent) is mirrored by a similarly sized sheet of opposite polarity traveling along the ground. This happens because unlike charges attract. The charged bottom of the cloud and the charged mirroring it on the ground move along together because of the electrostatic attraction. The distance between these two charged areas (air gap) serves to keep the charges separated. As the cloud moves along the charges keep trying to annihilate the potential difference between cloud and ground.
As the cloud moves you might notice short leaders jumping from the ground upwards toward the cloud above (St. Elmo's Fire). The leaders are trying to make a connection and will form on anything that reduces the air gap. If they are visible it's time to lay as flat as possible.
If you are near a tall tree or metal tower they will always attract lightning and should be avoided because of secondary effects.
A strike is initiated when a leader from the ground reaches upward and joins a leader from the cloud reaching down. The areas of charge on the cloud bottom and on the ground are both spread over a large area. When the leaders make contact, they establish a very narrow path by ionizing the air in the gap which may be a foot or so in diameter. Once the arc is started all of the charged particles on the cloud bottom (several acres in extent) rush to join in the current flow through ionized leader path to ground. Currents in the million amp range may flow and heat up the air which causes it to violently expand and produce thunder.
Often missed by people discussing lighting are secondary effects. Once the strike is passing a very large current (a million amps) which is flowing sideways from the edges of the charged area to the ionized connection. This is also a current, mirrored by the charges flowing through the ground. Now you have a million amps flowing sideways through the ground This will generate an extremely strong electromagnetic pulse. Any metal objects (telephone wires, stove pipes, copper pipes, electric fence wires &c, &c fiber optic cables no problem) will act as an air core transformer and induce a charge of several tens of thousands Volts as the charge eventually dissipates. (My brother had a private well with a submersible pump. The pump stopped working after a thunder storm passed through the area, the motor was burned out even though it was 85' below ground and under water!)
The actual voltages are not DC nor AC as such because there are inductive and capacitive elements which produce a damped oscillation.
PS trees are very bad Ju-Ju as a lightning strike will pass through the bark and burn a conductive path through the sap, which boils to steam and is known to cause a nasty explosion.
Regards,
GtG
PS Hope that clears everything up...
I feel like I now have a degree in lightning. Thanks, professor.
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Many moons ago was on the summit ridge of Mt. Eolus in the CO Rockies with my brother, about 150 yards from the top.
Unbeknownst to us, a storm had been approaching from the other side of the mountain.
Shortly after getting onto the ridge, hair began standing on end and sparks jumping off our ice axes.
We immediately bailed out the quickest route down. Probably 5 minutes later lightning struck the ridge we’d been on.
Very exciting.
That means two things:
1) Mother Nature is locking you on target.
2) It’s high time to GTFO of Dodge.
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