Anyone been near to a lightning strike or seen the aftermath?

Roen wrote: »

I was running across the main road down the hill where I'm from when I was 16 and a bolt hit the ground about 30cm from me. A chip of the road surface flew up and smacked me in the leg. I jumped about as high as anyone ever has and sped up considerably.

The noise was terrific and it took me about half an hour for my heart rate to return back to normal

Called into a friends house and she asked me why I was so white.
I consider myself very, very lucky. The road was awash and it landed so close that I was sure I should have been fried.

when you're running, you only have one foot on the ground at a time and only for a short time. Could be that that savedyou from a direct hit or shock from adjacent strike on the ground.

I've had lightning strike about 10 feet from me, as I was looking out the window during a rainstorm. Apart from the lightning itself and the very loud bang, there was no other sign that it had happened - not even a bit of scorched grass.

Incidentally, about 90% of people hit directly by lightning survive.

I was in Ibiza Town a few years ago during a thunderstorm, we were waiting for the coach to take us back to our hotel near a Marina, there was a huge flash from fork lightning that hit the water on front of us, the noise was deafening and the smell of burning afterwards was in the air, it frightened the s..t out of us. That was no more than a few hundred feet from us.

Preparing to get onto the the Sorba Slides in the Piedmont region of the Italian Alps last summer for some fairly extreme kayaking, a thunderstorm started up overhead. We delayed getting ready, as sharp-edged wet paddles provide pretty good point-field-effect transitions for the huge electric field potentials to cause us problems when on the water. Sitting under a bus shelter during the downpour I was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle, when about 30m in front of me on the edge of the ridge above the village, a bolt went through a tree right on the ridgeline. It was very pretty to see the tree's shape delineated by a hugely bright purple glow, followed by the tree's effective disintegration. The bolt came from behind and overhead, as the sound was felt/heard sooner than the distance would have suggested. Also, during the same storm, another strike hit the hillside about 100m away from me, just on the opposite side of the valley. A much bigger strike, but with a very noticeable tenth of a second or so from light to sound. I didn't feel any local charge buildup either time but we decided as a group to go for coffee and delay throwing ourselves down those waterfalls for a little while anyway!

It's funny how many odd fallacies have come up with lightning and strikes. The presence of metal has much less bearing on the likelihood of being struck than you'd think - it's all about the shape of stuff. Pointy or edged stuff is much more likely to create a leader than something round and smooth. Something metal and kinda pointed may create a leader more readily than a sharp insulator due to electron mobility in the metal but under the huge potentials involved it won't make that much difference. Being saturated wet is a protection as well, allowing the charge path to go through the water on your clothes than through your skin, though there is still the risk of burns from water flashing to steam on your skin. Kayaking during a thunderstorm is a high risk as the paddles are usually sharp edged so they are strike targets even if made from decent insulators like fiberglass or composites, and the paddles also may be a more amenable path to the riverbed to ground than the surrounding water may be. Also kayakers would likely be the tallest thing in the vicinity..

If you feel the air charge up, put your feet together, squat down and form as tight a ball as you can. Try to get to a hollow in the ground, and stay away from things that outcrop such as boulders and trees. Don't lie down, don't put your hands on the ground, don't worry too much as there's nothing you an really do

If there's a strike within ~10m or so of you, if your feet are far apart, the charge dissipation from the strike point may find that the path up and down your legs is less resistance than that through the ground between your feet, giving you a nasty shock. This is the reason why many farm animals die from a lightning strike.