How to survive a lightning strike (2014)
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
As one who was like 30 yards from a 60’ lone maple tree in an open field, the thunderous crack of the trunk split open in half by a lightning strike. No warning whatsoever (other than full cloudy cover).
Weirdest part is that my deafness made me rather immune to being startled toward such loud noises. Your body feels it all over. If a rave is your thing, this is THE thing.
My gaze zoomed in at the long field grasses that had started to straighten upward and starting outward from the base of that tree.
Felt like it was the longest 1,000 yard stare but a myopic gaze of a lifetime. It was then when the hairs at the back of my neck stood up violently straight out and alarmingly so.
Even weirdly so, the grasses started to straigten up in an ever rapidly expanding concentric ring from that spot. Like that reticular shockwave after a bomb exploded but it wasn’t at speed of sound, much less at speed of light.
I started staring at the edge of a single undulation ring of straighten field grass as it rapidly approached me; that is one fast approaching ring-of-SOMETHING (at what seems to be about 14 meter per second). Intense fear rushed over me.
My instinct? Jump over it as the ring passes under me and timingly so.
Felt nothing.
Just then noticed the smoldering wood splinters at the base afterward.
Did I escape the electric charge? I will never know.
I'd just applied a spray-on anti-slip floor treatment to the very-very-tiny bathroom floor, in a dodgy student apartment (mainly to cover up some ugly stained Linoleum). Then I see this tide of a thin layer of flame rolling rapidly at me, along the floor from the adjacent kitchen. Without thinking, I somehow jumped seemingly backwards, onto the edge of the bathtub, somehow didn't fall, and then jumped forwards, over the tide of flame, and out of the bathroom with the flaming floor treatment. Afterwards, I mentioned that I'd had the thought "fire shouldn't be coming from that direction", and I suspect that I was already jumping before that thought registered.
After the automatic, cat-like jumping, which I didn't know I had in me, I then consciously focused on grabbing kitchen fire extinguisher, and putting out the flames.
(Turns out that a gas from the floor treatment was highly flammable, and apparently heavier than air. Gas had rolled out, into the kitchen, and got to the pilot light beneath the apartment's mini oven/range.)
All the same, probably good you jumped over it, just in case.
- I felt the gradual rise of my hair-ends before the lumination period of lighting strike. This is most commonly documented.
- the unexplained violent rise of my hair ends at the nape of my neck rose shortly after the lumination period like within 300 meter/sec (speed of sound? or radiating electrical transference through humid air? ground-based? or pyschological? speed of nerve cells?). There are many excerpts to this account but its not common and little in the way of white papers on this.
- the rushing oncoming grass undulation is like 14 meter/second. obviously the “grasses” takes longest to transfer these electric charges. Barely any excerpts to this aspect (I seen more excerpts and photos of people being literally charred by lightning while sitting on toilet than this part).
EDIT: I have since learned that “water/air-based electron drift velocity” or “multi-phase Fermi velocity” may best describes this. arguably the moisture of each grass stalk doing electric charge transfer en masse between dew droplets or maybe even its own internal grass stalk moisture?
Liken it to a group transference of electric charges going from many cycles of water to air to water to air?
This remains a fascinating topic but in 1978 we did not have the words to this phenomenon until now.
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2014/02/19/what-is-t...
All I recall was seeing the biggest flash of my life and then being ~6ft away from where I was, no idea how long it was between those points. I had almost no control of my body after, I couldn’t properly speak, could barely walk, and it took me ages to manage to control my hands enough to call someone.
I spent the rest of that day in hospital being monitored, but they never found any physical damage after various tests. I probably got lucky, but I felt off for days after.
I’m been shocked badly before, but even the worst instance doesn’t even come close to how bad this particular experience was.
It doesn’t matter to me what it’s called really, it was still bad.
The problem is that, though there is a lot of information and a lot of advancements continuously, the brain and consciousness is still poorly understood. Certainly neurology provides a lot of information about the parts of the brain, but as a whole, it is so complex that it may never be fully understood. Strong AI, as a result, is a fantasy of science fiction.
Electricity will obliterate all myelin in the body, which surrounds nerve cell axions to insulate them and increase the rate at which electrical impulses are passed along the axon. The purpose of myelin is to increase the speed at which electrical impulses (known as action potentials) propagate along the myelinated fiber.
IANAN, but the result of losing myelin is everything described in the article, memory problems, cognitive disfunction and pain, and unmentioned, the individual will no longer recognize sarcasm, revealing a particular type of brain damage. Patients get the same result from electro-convulsive therapy, and it is bizarre that it is still an approved treatment for depression; trades your depression for brain damage, effectively an electrical lobotomy. Anyone that experiences sufficient electric shock will also develop one of the many pain disorders, such as fibromyalgia and polymyalgia.
Losing myelin is considered permanent, but it actually will grow back, it just takes about 20 years. When it finally does grow back, the patient is bombarded with extra brain function, such as rapid thoughts and hearing voices. Without stabilizing drug therapy, this can lead to severe and lasting insomnia, which can lead to extreme sleep deprivation, which can lead to despair and suicide.
Maybe it’s like a psychological thing, after getting struck once they start to subconsciously crave it and expose themselves to situations where it is likely to happen again?
I like the Navajo take on it. Once struck by lightning you are forever infected with strangeness.
Modern theory says that lightning is the amplified voice of a distant pulsar. Very distant. Outside our galaxy. Superstrange. Basically an alien god.
Which would explain a lot.
It does?
This counts as an amplifier in the same way that avalanche photodiodes do.
(Stretching out arms sounds strange, don’t you want to minimize your reach of contact points with the ground, considering how many V/m there will be if lightning strikes close to you?)
We're a little coddled now though, I'd say.
Just being on the farm, 20 acres back (a few miles), and a surprise storm... where do you go? Under the tress, surely not!
Laying flat may be the only hope.
People used to be outside more, I'd say. I wonder what the historical vs modern wrt population strike numbers look like?
Well, hitting the ground with your face first would be unpleasant
> (Stretching out arms sounds strange, don’t you want to minimize your reach of contact points with the ground, considering how many V/m there will be if lightning strikes close to you?)
I'm guessing it's to basically try to be as flat as possible, covering head would make you be overall higher off the ground
Most of the advice I've seen pretty much goes by "just try to be least conductive target around"
But also try to be not around a slightly worse conductor, like a tree. A slightly better conductor is also not a good idea (getting 1/2 of the current is still deadly).
Current tends to flow around and over things, rather than through them. That is, on the surface. Which means that the conductivity of dry wood ("through") matters far less than the conductivity of slightly mineralised water ("over" or "around").
The pacemaker itself probably isn’t designed for lightning strikes, but it probably is designed to survive hits from a defibrillator. I’d put money on a pacemaker/ICD surviving a lightning strike.
I feel like there's less risk from ground current than there would be from a direct strike. There's probably a certain compromise; you don't want to be too close to the tree (otherwise lightning can jump back onto you from the tree), but neither too far away where you become the only path to ground.
1) Drop and step away from all metal (golf clubs, backpacks with metal frames, etc). You are not Thor and cannot wield lightning.
2) Crouch and cross your arms over your knees to make the shortest ground to ground circuit. Lightning is looking for a high point and you don't want to be it.
If I were to guess why the first guy was struck in the article, it could have been the pin flag in his hand or his golf club in the other hand (presumably) that was the catalyst for the strike.
Source: Been backpacking since the days of external metal frames.
edit: I've heard from witnesses that sometimes you get 1-2 seconds of your hair standing up as a warning signal before being struck. So if your arm hair stands up, DROP.
Do not get touched by it period. Nothing will save you.