Last month we got the first rainstorm in a long time, and it turned out to be a big electrical storm. My girls were in bed and I was sitting on the terrace eagerly watching the first raindrops fall. Suddenly there was an enormous clap of simultaneous thunder and lightning and the lights in the house went out. Turns out that it struck the transformer box of my next-door-neighbor’s robot mower. In addition to knocking out the power in our house and the houses around us, it also fried our internet box, cable box, Apple TV box and our own robot mower.
Needless to say, it woke my girls. But the most interesting thing is that my youngest informed me that at the moment the lightning struck outside, she felt and heard a ‘snap’ in her fingers and saw ‘blue electricity.’ Otherwise she was fine.
Obviously this was related to the lightning strike in some way. But what exactly was it? And was it dangerous? And how do I avoid it happening again?
(PS I myself was fine on the terrace, but am glad I wasn’t witnessing the storm from the middle of my garden)
Probably not “struck.”
But, there is a tremendous electrical field right before the air breaks down and starts to conduct. At that moment, any protruding surface may show sparks or corona discharge. See: St. Elmo’s fire.
ETA: I was outside when a big storm blew up. I heard “snap snap snap,” and looked over to see sparks jumping off the metal roof of the building next to me to the downspout. Moments later, another building got hit by lightning in a tremendous boom. I left.
Many years ago at the family cottage, lightning struck somewhere very nearby just as my sister was reaching for the handle of the fridge. A spark jumped from the handle to her fingertips across about a 2 inch gap. She was startled and felt a short pain like being jabbed but had no visible marks. What the actual “path” from the strike to the fridge handle was I don’t know, the power was not interrupted, no fuses got blown and the electric service had surge suppressors installed. It was probably a discharge from the associated intense electric field as @beowulff mentions above.
Needless to say, the rest of her siblings (all brothers) make occasional mention of the event to tease her about her occasional lapse in memory or judgement.
During a lightning strike the current is so high that even if you ground objects only a inch or apart on a ground cable they will still have thousands of volts between them. On a sailboat every thing you want to ground should be tied to a single grounding point on the lightning rod running down the mast.
My sister was shocked by lightning–it struck outside her house, and she was in the basement doing laundry–but the voltage gradient was enough to give her a moderate shock. Nothing serious, though.
It’s potentially dangerous, especially for someone with heart problems. But it’s also not very likely, and probably not worth doing anything about.
Lightning is strange stuff, and even if you don’t get a direct jolt from the sky, lots of little tendrils from a nearby strike will rise up out of the ground to give a smaller bite to people and objects. Once, I was walking across a parking lot, and I saw lightning strike a radio transmitter tower about 100 yards away. I didn’t feel anything, but a guy walking 20 feet from me jumped. As I got back to the dorm, I heard him telling his friends he had been struck by lightning. He said sparks flew out of his umbrella. At the time, I thought he was lying, but as I learned more about lightning, I’ve come to think he got a secondary bite from the ground.
Think about it. The bolt traveled miles through empty air to get to ground. Yet, we think all of it is going to ignore our puny defensive measures to flow along the path we choose for it. Yes, you’re probably safe…probably.
An electrical engineer told me about a trick old ham radio guys used. You drive an iron pipe into the ground and weld a car spark plug to the top of it. Then attach your antenna wire to the top of the plug before it goes in the house. He said that’s usually enough to protect the radio gear from lightning.
I remember riding my bicycle home when I was a teenager in the rain, and lightning struck a few hundred feed away from me. My fingers were touching the metal handlebar, and I felt a shock when the lightning struck.
The house I grew up in had an aluminum tower next to the house for the TV antenna. They used flat twin-lead wire for TV then, and it had a cheaply made arrester clamped to the tower. Basically, it pierced the wire, and had a little gap between the wire and the clamp. I didn’t understand how that was supposed to work, but it’s the same principal.
We’re on cable, now, and I’ve lost 3 cable boxes and 2 TVs to lightning, despite the system’s grounding being up to “code.”
My wife says when she was a kid, someone in her family was on the phone during a storm when lightning arced out of the phone and made a bee-line for the kitchen spigot. No one was hurt, no property damage, la la how the life goes on.
There has been more than one time that sparks have crackled off metal objects (such as doorknobs) around me a moment before I hear thunder during a storm
I can remember being with my Dad on a 20 foot Lyman inboard running from Nut Island [small island off Amherst Island in Canada] to a friends house in Prenyer’s Cove as a storm started brewing, and my mid back length hair was standing out from the electricity until I looked like a dandelion @_@ We were very close to becoming a statistic. [when there is enough static electricity in the air to lift a head full of 24 inch hair, it is almost time for the lightening to hit] That storm was close enough, that the tree next to the cottage we were staying in got hit and turned into toothpicks. I can remember siting on the porch [one of those really great old porches that are like 20 feet deep by the width of the entire house, it was screened in because it was originally a ‘sleeping porch’ and watching the entire sky being lit by sheets of lightening from horizon to horizon. It was amazing
And I still love thunder and lightening, as long as I am not having to be out in it or driving somewhere in it.
I was thinking about that. Four years ago then we bought the house we paid something like $7k to replace the old fuse box (the one with those round ceramic fuses) with a modern one. So I was surprised that our devices got fried. The guy I spoke to at the cable provider said that really big surges can still get through.
It’s probably worth mentioning that loud, unexpected noises can trigger perception of a flash of light and a physical sensation. So whilst it’s possible that your kid was in some way directly affected by some portion of the electrical discharge, it’s also possible that the phenomenon was one that happened inside of her own nervous system in response to a loud, sudden noise.
Exactly the same thing happened to my wife when we were standing on the top deck of a ferry on which we were returning from the island where we had got married the day before.
In the fractions of a second when the electrical charge is “finding” its path from the cloud to the ground, numerous “feelers” start reaching up from nearby tall/pointy objects trying to connect to the leader. The one that connects initiates the return stroke, but the others that don’t are strong enough to kill someone.
