Posted on 01/11/2015 5:22:14 PM PST by Coleus
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.
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You are correct ,, I was trying to keep it short and sweet ,, I took many meteorology courses as an instrument pilot .. I had a wooden lighting pole (about 25’ tall) explode about 50’ from me due to an indirect lightning hit (main hit was to a metal trailer).
Always carry a 1 iron over your head during lightening storms - not even God can hit a 1 iron.
I don't have access to a scientific or medical library, but one source that is not behind a paywall is https://www.uic.edu/labs/lightninginjury/Electr&Ltn.pdf:
Step voltage, a difference in electrical potential between a person’s feet, may occur as lightning current spreads radially through the ground. A person is a far better conductor of electricity than the earth. Thus a person who has one foot closer than the other to the strike point will have a potential difference between the feet so that the lightning current will preferentially flow through the legs and body rather than the ground. This is a common killer of large livestock such as cattle and horses because of the distance between their hind legs and forelegs.
(For that claim, the paper cites: Andrews CJ, Darveniza M, Mackerras D: Lightning injury: a review of clinical aspects, pathophysiology, and treatment, Adv Trauma 4:241, 1989.)
No not really, it was a job back then.
Today you would not be doing that kinda stuff. Also, the cables were wrapped in a fire retardant. Guess what that was...asbestos.
Luckily, 90% of the time you had to pump these pits out because they were full of water so the asbestos was wet when you removed it from the cables. Heck, we did not know it caused problems til a few years after I started working them.
The voltage differential between legs can really only exist if there is a significantly larger component of distance along the radial line to the strike point. [Angular distance will not contribute to the step differential.] This can almost never be true in random distributions of cattle, and is absolutely smaller than the large differential field effect produced by the "pointiness" of bovine and equine legs.
If you bunch a large number of lightening rods at distances equivalent to the distances between a cow or horses hooves, you will not see their effect minimized, nor will you see much of a potential difference between them if the strike point is some distance away. Far more likely is that one of the rods will be the strike point. And that is exactly what happens with horses and cows.
Hi! I agree with what you have said. And, I suspect that you already know the following, but: In the case of a lightning strike, the voltage risetime is extremely fast. Therefore, in addition to Ohm’s law, inductance and skin effect must be considered. This means that even a very robust conductor may have very large voltages appear across it, for long enough to kill you, before the ohmic effect clamps the voltage.
Current recommendation is to squat on the balls of your feet, with just your elbows touching your knees...it’s hard to maintain this for very long as it’s some kind of balancing act...just do the best you can.
Try to minimize contact with the ground and to make yourself as small/short as possible.
If in a group, spread out at least 40-50 feet from each other.
A friend had his house hit by lightning, while he was home alone. Blew a 2 inch hole through the roof. He said it made no sound, except ‘like bacon frying’.
The ultimate zot.
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