Is it true that you shouldn’t take a bath or shower in a thunder storm because lightning might strike you’re house ? What about my kiddie pool, is that dangerous ?
And while I’m at it, is it dangerous to be on the phone or on a computer ?
Thanks.
Doubtless your question can be better addressed by an electrical engineer or a safety expert of some kind, but the question about phones, at least, is one law students commonly encounter in their first year torts class. And since you don’t seem to be drawing any answers from such experts on electrical safety, I’ll offer what little I know as an attorney who does very little tort law.
The telphone situation you describe is commonly discussed in law school to illustrate an important point about risk management. As a society we make many decisions about how risky products or practices are allowed to be based on the chance of an injury, and the costs associated with reducing risk. For instance, we could build cars that are as solid as tanks but they would cost a fortune in fuel to run, so we don’t.
So it is with the design of telephones. There are well-documented incidents of persons having been severely injured or even killed because they were on the telephone during a thunder storm and a lightning bolt struck a nearby telephone pole. It would be possible to design telephone poles so that the risk would be greatly reduced, but this would be prohibitively expensive and the instances of people suffering a serious shock in this way is, in any case, extremely rare. For these reasons, people who sue phone companies over such instances don’t (at least generally) succeed.
You can eliminate the risk of shock by not using the phone during a thunderstorm, but the risk is low to begin with. I expect–but I can’t cite any authority–that the same holds true for the other activities you mentioned.
I won’t even try to claim I know the truth about this, but the story (Urban Legend?) is that a lightning strike nearby could cause a potentially lethal shock of electricity to travel up the lead or copper pipes to the tub. Take it how you will.
Years ago, when I was hit by lightning (the first time), I was merely knocked down (okay, it hurt like the dickens, too). A friend of mine over a hundred feet away was actually burnt, and received a worse shock than I did- he had been working with a plugged-in power drill at the time.
shrug
Still wondering if someone know if it’s dangerous to take a bath or shower in a thunder storm.
Thanks
This site, Lightning Safety Indoors from NOAA gives safety information. For further sites try searching for “lightning safety.”
I happen to be an electrical engineer. If a lightning strike hits nearby, it’s going to send a huge pulse through the local ground system, which includes the earth, the electrical wiring in your house, and your water pipes as well. I can’t imagine that you’d get more than a tiny fraction of the energy from the lightning bolt this way, but the thing to keep in mind is that lightning bolts are up in the millions of volts range, so a tenth of a percent of a million volt lightning bolt is still about 10 times more voltage than you’d get from sticking the electric cord from your hair dryer straight into the bathtub.
Lightning, because it is such high voltage, sometimes does really weird things. Lower voltage electricity would follow your phone line, but lightning has so much energy that it would vaporize the wire before it got very far and then it may or may not follow where the wire was. It could jump to a more convenient path to ground quite easily, and in fact probably would.
The biggest danger while on your computer is damage to the computer itself. If lightning hits your house, and just happens to take exactly the right path down to ground, you could theoretically be injured while sitting at your computer, but the chances of this happenging are almost impossible. However, a lightning strike even a fair distance away can travel down the power lines, and by the time it got to your house it would be so low energy that it won’t jump from any equipment in your house to you, but it’s still very capable of killing your equipment (tv, stereo, computer, etc). I’ve heard of really silly ideas like tying your AC cord into a knot to prevent the spike from coming through (doesn’t work). Your best bet is to unplug the computer until after the storm has passed. Surge protectors work pretty well too, as long as the lightning doesn’t hit too close. A really close lightning strike is going to go straight through any commercially available surge protector though.