At my local swimming pool the lifegaurd makes everyone get out of the pool during thunderstorms because of a belief that the danger of lightning to people in a swimming pool is greater than the danger to people outside of the pool. Is there evidence to support this belief? Has anyone swimming in a pool ever been struck by lightning? Is it in fact safer during a thunderstorm to be standing near a swimming pool than to be
swimming in it?
I don’t think the original plan was to get out of the pool and stand wet outside in the open air like skin-covered lightning rods. you get out of the pool and go inside!
The only thing a nonconformist hates more than a conformist is another nonconformist who does not conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
I would assume the lifeguard would also tell the people in the pool to go inside as well. I can’t imagine that standing in a big pool of water is beneficial to your health when electricity is present.
I would think standing next to the pool wouldn’t help you very much, especially if your idea of taking cover is to sit on a metal deck chair.
I don’t think it’s because a swimming pool is a particularly good target for lightning - it’s gotta be worse than by itself than, say, a sky scraper, or a big tree in a field - but there is good reason to do this.
First, lightning research shows that lightning is a lot more unpredictable than thought. What ultimately attracts a lightning strike is when the object’s ionization is (I believe) different than the lightning itself. This can be a blade of grass, even.
With a bunch of people in a pool, you run that much more risk that someone (or, heck, a hair on someones head if what the lightning special I saw on The Discovery Channel) will be primed for a strike, even if the pool is surrounded by large radio antennae.
And since water is a nice conductor of electricity, one strike could kill or severely harm many at once.
So, for the love of God, get out of the pool!
Yer pal,
Satan
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For a slightly selfish take on it:
He’s sitting atop a high metal chair. He wants to go in. But if he leaves, everybody leaves. So leave already. 
The Canadians. They walk among us. William Shatner. Michael J. Fox. Monty Hall. Mike Meyers. Alex Trebek. All of them Canadians. All of them here.
Perhaps the rationale is that electricity from a lightning strike dissipates through the ground, and since most pools are in the ground, it would not be a good place to be, should a bolt hit nearby.
Personal experience with lightning. We live on a lake front and a couple of years ago 4 or 5 of us were out swimming and tube floating when a thunderstorm came in. The wimps and wimmin ran for the house but us drunks…uh…brave he-man types, stayed in the water figuring we wouldn’t get any wetter if it rained.
Lightning hit a pine tree about 50’ from where were were putzing around in the water. The guys who were standing on the bottom got a real jolt and those of us in tubes got whacked pretty good too. Whereupon we went inside.
At least it didn’t hit the beer cooler.
JB
Lex Non Favet Delicatorum Votis
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- The danger is not that the water causes lightning to strike any more; it’s that there is a “shock radius” around the strike, in which you can be easily stunned into unconciousness. If you’re standing on the ground, you just fall over but floating around in a pool (or lake) becomes a real bad place to be. - MC
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I think AWB II’s take is a good one. When the lifeguard gets everyone out, does he get down from his chair? I wouldn’t want to be up there during an electrical storm.
I suppose the added humidity from the pool could decrease the breakdown voltage of the air near the pool, making it a more likely target. Assuming it isn’t raining already.
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.
Would all the fish and animals in a lake be killed if it were struck by lightning? What would happen If I dropped a plugged-in extension cord in a pool or lake? Could I kill everyone and everything instantly??
Sweet Basil
If you dropped an electrical cord into the lake, it’s degree of danger to a swimmer is probably a function of the distance between the two. The force (voltage) would dissipate in a spherical pattern in the water (barring things like water currents and layers of contaminants), and I want to say that it drops by the square of the distance from the source. In other word, you get 1/4 the voltage at 2 feet away as you do 1 foot away. What I’m fuzzy on is if you have 115V in a 0.5 inch arc in the water (the gap between the sockets), how many volts does that translate to 1 foot away. That also does not account for the resistance of the water (again, assuming it’s uniform).
In other words, it doesn’t take that much for the voltage to drop to below that of a 1.5V battery. Of course, what kills you is the amperage, not the voltage, and that’s a function of how well the water conducts, the dirtier the better. So if you can see the end of the cord in the water from 10 feet away, you may live. If you’re swimming in a mud hole, you may be a dead man.
Sweet Basil- I have read reports (okay, in “News of the Weird”, but still) of someone who was quite successful in fishing by dropping power lines into lakes.
Quite successful until the time he forgot to pull the line out of the lake before he dove in to collect his catch.
So, anyways, it’s possible to fish that way. It’s also possible to fish using dynamite. Neither of these ways is neccesarily the smartest way to do it, though.
JMCJ
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“Fish-calling,” i.e. using an old crank-up telephone with the cord dragging off the boat in the water, used to be a popular method of scaring up lunch in my father’s poor home town in southwest Virginia. Similar stories have since ballooned into epic urban legends about agro-americans fish-calling from aluminum boats and other such nonsense, but Dad says its true–he did it.
Incidentally, the fish-caller has a modern descendant, which Virginia Tech students use to estimate eel populations in the Shennandoah River. My friend who worked on the project told me a good one about a professor who would put the business end on the end of a long pole and wade into deep holes in tributaries that loaded canoes couldn’t negotiate. You can imagine what happened one day when he dropped the pole while facing upstream.
Were we talking about lightning and swimming pools? Sorry.