Jay_W
Dork
7/15/15 11:27 p.m.
I'd pay good money to see ball lightning. Truly spooky wierd ish, that.
Closest I've come to getting hit was a few years back when we were out in a field mid-day and the car antennas started crackling, and my crew started laughing cuz their hair was sticking up... and I was the only one there that thought "O bloody hell we're in deep doo-doo now"... the wrinkle being, we were setting up a commercial fireworks display at the time. Not the best feeling in the world, carrying a case of 4" shells while being scanned and targeted by Thor, thinking "great, juuust great, what an amusing obituary THIS is gonna be" while trying to impress upon 20 other people how much danger we were in. Since I rarely scream and shout, this got their attention and all jumped into the truck and the bolt hit a tree about a football field away. Close enough, really. There was enough RF in the air that I was wondering if corona discharge was gonna start lighting fuses for me. Thinkin this may be why none of the lottery tickets I buy work, I done used up all my luck that day.
after a round of golf we (the 4some) was sitting on the porch of the 100+yr old club house … made with truly HUGE boulders … sitting in old school rocking chairs with our feet propped up on the waist high wall, still in our golf shoes (this the old days when we still wore spikes)
lightening struck a 3' white pine about 50 yards away … we suddenly realized that we had steel spikes on and QUICKLY got inside and our shoes off
Standing in the doorway one day during a storm with a lot of ligtning (and later baseball sized hail), I felt my lower leg hair shocking the opposing leg. Very weird. Never had anything like that happen again. I got out of the doorway, though.
I have had several lightning encounters. The first one was on the cargo ramp at the Flint airport. We were loading racks of chevy 350s on a DC-8. It was raining very hard. One of the guys working with us had soaking wet shoulder length hair that stood straight up. We ran indoors as lightning struck a light pole on the ramp.
Next time I was flying a Lear 24 when we got hit. It was very bright. It knocked out the radar, when we needed it most, and left some pinholes on the trailing edge of the right aileron.
cwh
PowerDork
7/16/15 12:18 p.m.
Wife's nephew had a lawn service for a few years, in Tampa FL. Has been hit by lightning three times. The boy ain't right in the head now.
In 1972 I was working the last corner station before the bridge turn at Road Atlanta for a kart race. I was on the phones holding an umbrella and it was pouring rain. The younger kids were on track and as they started down the hill many of them were spinning like tops. With no warning I was suddenly engulfed in a ball of fire and heard a tremendous explosion. I felt that my whole body was compressed. I was standing with my hand in the position of holding the umbrella and my knees were bent. The umbrella was blowing down the track. I was so weak and dizzy I almost fell. The other corner workers were standing in a line on the bank watching the race. They all casually turned around to see what the noise was and where it came from. They didn't see anything except me with, Im told, an odd look on my face, so they turned back toward the track. I sort of came to my senses and realized what had happened, hung the phones up and told the captain that I had been hit by lightning and was going to my car.
I talked to an electrical engineer and he said that undoubtedly most of the power went to ground through the copious quantities of rain running off the umbrella. So I was in fact engulfed in fire. Believe me, it was a hard hit but fortunately most of the power didn't flow through me. Enough to stun me though. It doesn't take much thunder now to send me indoors. I want no more of that.
I remember reading somewhere a long time back about a woman struck by lighting … I'm thinking in Arizona … maybe New Mexico … anyway somewhere southwest with tremendous distances to the horizon … clear, cloudless, sunny day … she was standing outside and was struck by lighting from a storm that was well over the horizon …
I mean, if you can't stand outside on a cloudless day without getting struck ….