Weather Imagery

This isn’t a straight-forward answer. Although the lightning bolt itself can’t hit you, it can travel through conductive surfaces within your house. Lightning is a master of trickery and can do some pretty strange things. People have found shelter in what appeared to be safe places only to have the great misfortune of being electrocuted. Although the odds of you being killed by lightning while inside a building during a thunderstorm are considerably worse than winning Powerball, it’s still possible and has happened on many occasions.

Lightning has no mass and defies the laws of gravity. It will zig-zag all over the place by going up, down, sideways, forwards and backwards. It travels great distances, sometimes a 100 miles! Adding to its mystique, lightning will travel along the path of least resistance which can span hundreds of feet along conductive surfaces not quite visible to you or I. Why is this important? Think for a second about what runs into and all around the inside of your house. There are conductive copper pipes bringing the water into your house from outside. There are iron pipes bringing natural gas into your house. There are solid gauge copper wires leading to every wall outlet, light switch, and electrical appliance in your house that attach to a very tall utility pole or one of those large green boxes somewhere on your street. There are copper telephone wires running to every phone jack, again from a utility pole or some other metal box on your street. There are copper coaxial cables running from your satellite dish or cable TV provider. All of these things conduct electricity and start outside your house. See where I’m going with this?

So, say lightning strikes a utility pole down the street from your house. The lightning quickly follows the path of least resistance which by the way, we have no way of knowing and may not be obvious. But we do know copper wires are conductive. As the 100,000,000 volts of electricity is racing down the wires, it jumps onto the telephone wires and races into your house. If the grounding system on you telephone wires is broken or not adequate, that electric current will exit the wires someplace. In addition to outdoor fatalities caused by lightning, a number of people are injured indoors every year, including individuals who incur telephone-mediated strikes. This is why it can be very dangerous to talk on a corded phone (not cordless or cellular) during a thunderstorm. As for the copper pipes …. lets just say I wouldn’t want to be caught on the toilet during a thunderstorm. The drain is PVC pipe, but the water pipes leading into the toilet are most likely copper which is conductive as well as the water itself.

Remember how we have no way of knowing what the path of least resistance is? Remember how lightning is a master of trickery? While I lived in North Carolina, the homeowners right behind us had their house hit by lightning. It went right through the top of their roof roughly creating a 2×2 foot hole. It must of flashed to the electrical wiring in the attic because it blew up every electrical appliance plugged into a wall outlet. The internal wiring inside the walls vaporized, blowing out chunks of drywall and left black acrid scorch marks in their place. About 35 feet from the front of their house was a utility pole and their house was surrounded by 60 foot pine trees. That day, the path of least resistance didn’t include any of those taller objects, but instead was an asphalt shingle roof. Here is a link to some pictures of another house unlucky enough to be struck by lightning.

One could makes themselves crazy worrying about stuff like this. Just remember, the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is in your house and the odds of you being struck are far worse than winning the Powerball lottery. If you happen to live in a part of the country that experiences a lot of thunderstorms, a good investment might be some sort of lightning protection device such as a properly grounded lightning rod or surge arrestor.

Other Lightning Myths

• Can Lightning Crash an Airplane?
• Do Lightning Rods Attract Lightning?
• Can Lightning Be Used As a Source of Power?
• Is Ball Lightning Real?
• Can Lightning Strike The Same Place Twice?
• Do My Car Tires Protect Me From Lightning?