Have you, or anyone you know, ever been struck by lightning?
I checked..I didn’t see that this question has ever been asked..
One time my ex-husband and I were standing in our living room during an intense electrical storm. Suddenly I felt a tingle literally move through my whole body and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It just lasted a moment, but I looked at my husband wide-eyed, and he was looking at me the same way. A moment after that a lightning bolt smashed down just across the street from us.
From what I know of lightning, we could have been hit inside our own house.
My dad and his wife live in Florida. One day they were in their garage and lightning struck the ground really close to her….and then started dragging her away. My dad grabbed for her, and started pulling her back. Even though the lightning had hit and was “gone” it continued to be a tug of war for a bit.
Freaky.
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Oddly No.
Considering that I lived in one of the word’s most notorious Lightning Strike hotspots:
The Tampa Bay area.
My house was a few Just ago! Scared the crap outta me! I had just gotten home from work and was sitting at my computer in the living room with a wild T-storm going over, under the window, when all of a sudden I heard a loud popping sound and a shower of sparks cascaded off the roof. I asked about it on fluther. haha
I saw that question @Coloma, as I was “researching” for this one. I’ll go back and read it.
When I was a little kid (but the oldest of us three girls,) in the 60’s, we lived in St. Pete @SecondHandStoke. Looking back, I don’t understand why my folks let us play in the rain. I don’t understand why we lived with an unfenced canal in our back yard. I don’t understand how they could put us on these skates!
My boyfriend is a leading researcher in the US on this very topic. He has come close but not been struck. He does some of his work with a Faraday Cage and does remote triggers with weather balloons, equip with instruments he has designed to collect data. The description of the lightning dragging someone sounds inaccurate. Close hits and people being hit by near-by strikes do happen.
Our house was hit by lightning while I was in it,does that count?
No, but my father came within a hair’s whisker of it, whilst cycling home from work through a storm on a rural country lane. Lightning hit the wet road in front of him, travelled towards him in a channel of water and he threw himself off his bike to avoid getting hit. He was shaken but unhurt, got back on the bike and when he got into the village he stopped at a shop to buy a can of pop. The shopkeeper saw how pale he was and said “Are you alright? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
My dad replied, “I nearly was a ghost!”
Correction: A few Julys ago…not a few justs ago. lol
A good friend from college. She started work in her area of study, archaeology, right after graduation. She was doing field work out on a plain in the Southwest with about twenty other researchers, and got hit. She has brain damage, but has regained quite a lot of function.
I watched a documentary on wild horse in Montanas Pryor Mtn. range. Multiple horses were struck and killed all at once. Like 4 or 5. It was amazing and sad.
No one I know, but would you believe that hapless Roy Cleveland Sullivan (1912–1983), a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, was hit seven times between 1942 and 1977. This earned him the dubious honor of a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Can’t help but wonder why he didn’t change his line of work after the first strike!
Yes. A friend of mine, I used to work with her. I also have 2 close friends (I don’t mean they are a couple, two seoarate friends) whose house was hit. I have another friend of a friend (I don’t know her) her umbrella was hit, and luckily she was fine. A man who came to fix something at my house, his car was hit on the way, he said he felt it, he was pretty freaked out. In the subdivision across from my house in TN a house there was hit twice, two years apart.
This is something I learned: When lightning strikes the ground, the ground becomes a conductor. The more contact you have with the ground, the bigger the impact on your body. Horses and cows, with their four legs, stand a higher chance of being killed, so they may not have been hit directly by bolts, like we imagine, but just being near a strike and standing on four points, they drop dead.
My darling Doc also was involved in a study on a coal mine that had an explosion. There were no points of ignition and they could not work out how the methane ignited so far below ground. They proved it was lightning from nearby storms conducted through the ground and some underground equipment causing sparks when electrified. They now know how to prevent such explosions in the future.
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