Why being in a car during a lightning storm is the safest place to be
As watcher of weather, both as as a one-time storm chaser as well as a person who gets sent email about weather of all kinds, I’ll have to say I’ve never seen anything like this video. The National Weather Service lighting safety page reports that a person’s odds of being struck by lightning are around 1 in 775,000 at any given time with 1/10,000 in an 80 year lifetime. Capturing the event live on video has to be even higher odds.
A police car dashcam captured footage of a direct lightning strike the roof of a Toyota Landcruiser carrying a senior Russian official on a rainy Russian day – while driving down the freeway.
I was even more struck by the odds of the lightning hitting the SUV while there are taller light poles along the freeway and taller buildings in the vicinity. It was just a case of being in the wrong place and the wrong time.
While the internal electronics for the SUV are possibly fried, the occupant wouldn’t be.
So why is being in a car during a lightning storm is the safest place to be? Two words – Faraday Cage. From Wikipedia:
A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure formed by conducting material or by a mesh of such material. Such an enclosure blocks external static and non-static electric fields. Faraday cages are named after the English scientist Michael Faraday, who invented them in 1836.
A Faraday cage’s operation depends on the fact that an external static electrical field will cause the electric charges within the cage’s conducting material to redistribute themselves so as to cancel the field’s effects in the cage’s interior. This phenomenon is used, for example, to protect electronic equipment from lightning strikes and electrostatic discharges.
A Faraday cage is best understood as an approximation to an ideal hollow conductor. Externally or internally applied electromagnetic fields produce forces on the charge carriers (usually electrons) within the conductor, generating electric currents that rearranges the charges. Once the charges have rearranged so as to cancel the applied field inside, the currents stop.
If the cage is grounded, the excess charges will go to the ground instead of the outer face, so the inner face and the inner charge will cancel each other out and the rest of the cage will retain a neutral charge.
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Note: The SUV has steel belted radial tires, and thus is essentially grounded as lightning easily jumps that dielectric gap.
h/t to WUWT reader Newton Love
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Cool. Been hit by lighting in an aircraft. They are an effective Faraday cage too. (As long as
the staic wicks are intact…) I would rather ride through a thunderstorm in a car however than
have that exquisite moment that you suddenly realize that you are about to go for an interesting ride. Especially when the cloud that you are in has turned a dark, sickly green…
Airplanes get struck by lightning on the ground and in-flight, damage is rare. Very high metal to glass ratio, so a reasonable “Faraday cage”. Not sure I’d want to try that in an SUV.
I haven’t seen a capture as good as this either, but I can tell you the odds of capturing all sorts of freak events in Russia are much higher than elsewhere because everybody there rides with a dash cam or a helmet cam constantly recording, collecting evidence for legal purposes, just in case (it is a wild country).
I wonder [how] a car with a fibreglass or carbon fibre body would cope?
Top Gear did a good segment on this…
http://youtu.be/GZxgYNnkBd0
I instruct navigators part time. We have a video taken at an airport in Japan where lightning strikes an aircraft shortly after take-off. It enters at the front and exits near the rear.
Last year an aircraft landing in Winnipeg was struck by lightning. passengers were not injured, but somewhat shook up.
With respect to a car, I heard (correctly?) that if you keep the windows closed you should be OK if lightning strikes.
Putin trying to prune the ranks? Running out of polonium?
RE: mwhite says:
September 27, 2012 at 7:53 am
I wonder [how] a car with a fibreglass or carbon fibre body would cope?
A good question. The new airbuses are also composite. I trust (but do not know) that they are embedding metal to carry the electrical strokes. Some new ones are 25-50 percent composite.
Not sure what they are doing to cars as the composites offer more resistance and I would expect would sustain more damage.
It’s happened to me twice, once travelling down through France during a terrible storm in a Renault 4 many years ago – we got hit repeatedly and finally stopped under the next bridge to take shelter. Then years after I got caught in a storm in Chelsea, London, with my dog. We got back in the car and it got hit – we were ok but it was scary (and the dog who hadn’t been fazed by thunder and lightening until that point) was always a basket case in a storm ever after.
Both times lightening was coming down and hitting the ground repeatedly. It’s something to see! The worst storm of that sort I ever saw was in Italy – it was right on top of us, a late summer storm, and I had two horses at livery in a field at a hilltop farm. The lightening was hitting ground in the field over and over, all around them – the poor things were terrified but I’d have had no chance of catching them even if I’d dared venture out. It was also hitting the house, and coming down via my bedroom light fitting, finding a corner, and whizzing round the room before finding a way out and down. I was in bed with the dog and cats, cowering under a duvet. I’d thought the house was earthed….
Gene that’s very interesting!
I nearly got fried on a golf course in Venezuela once…
We should build a Faraday cage around the Earth for the next Carrington Event…
@tgmccoy says:
September 27, 2012 at 7:37 am
Saw that dark sickly green over Savannah one night in 1972. Also green 2Lt at the controls of a mighty O-2. Fortunately he flew the checklist (thunderstorm penetration airspeed and all that) and got himself and one shaky Staff Sergeant (me) on the ground safely.
Rarely I’ve been very close to a lightning strike. It’s usually proceeded by a slight flash & snapping sound, then a fraction of a second later, the real bolt. Ear-drums can be busted…
I was in my car once when it got hit by lightning. The wiring was fried, but I felt nothing.
I did get shocked once holding a (land line) phone during a thunderstorm. Not as strong as an electrical outlet shock, but it was startling.
OT: The Wikipedia page of Marcel Leroux is under attack by some zealots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Marcel_Leroux
To those here who have read his work, help would be appreciated.
I have several Faraday flashlights that work quite well. Not sure I want a Faraday SUV. Yikes!
In April 1999 a two seat all GRP training glider (ASK21) was struck by cloud to cloud lightning when at approximately 2,500ft above the ground and several hundred ft above cloudbase. The airframe disintegrated on or immediately after the strike, the pilot (an acquaintance of mine) and student both parachuted to the ground safely albeit with minor injuries.
On examination, the aircraft’s main spar was found to be desiccated, i.e. all the moisture in the resin/rovings composite had gone leaving behind a structure similar in properties to tissue paper.
The AAIB accident investigation report can be found here
http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/dft_avsafety_pdf_500699.pdf
The pilot continued to fly for some years but has now effectively given up the sport.
tgmccoy says: “Cool. Been hit by lighting in an aircraft.”
It isn’t cool when the lady two rows up the aisle starts screaming. Been there, done that.
I’d like to know if the electronics in the car were “fried” as you postulate.
I had a friend get hit by lightning in his SUV, and there was no damage except a burn mark at the corner of the sheet metal by the passenger front windshield. No electronic problems at all.
Makes you wonder about the EMP disaster scenarios from both manmade and sun-caused events. I know that power lines and EMP are a potentially huge problem, but cars and consumer electronics, I’m not so sure.
My house got hit by lightning. Direct hit on the oil tank vent cap which sticks out of the foundation opposite the basement-mounted oil tank. It blew a few ground fault interruptors, took out my Dish network receiver, one 10-100 ethernet switch, and one of three HDMI ports on my LCD TV.
That’s it, from a direct strike, so again, I’m not too worried about EMP or solar events.
Years ago, houses and other buildings generally had lightning rods. There are fewer lightning rods now. Perhaps that didn’t matter when there was a cast iron sewer vent sticking up and cast iron pipe to the ground, but plumbing is now plastic, and house wiring is too flimsy to deal with lightening. Should houses be equipped with lightning rods? Or were lightening rods less common in the past than I presume and lightning strikes on houses are too uncommon for lightning rods to be worthwhile?
Kids, don’t try this at home.
Heck, some of the other videos are even better!
It certainly is not always the high points that are struck. Way back in days when we were experiencing many vivid lightning storms I lived in an 18-storey apartment building. Far below us, directly across the road was a 3-storey hotel, and next to that a 10-storey YMCA. Those nights I was getting many good lightning shots, and was taking out my camera and tripod one night as a storm rumbled up. As I walked out onto the balcony, a dazzling strike barreled down right in front of my eyes, striking the hotel so very many floors further down. A wind had come up with the storm, blowing some curtains out of an open window. The flash ignited the curtains, which resulted in a huge chorus of shouts of ‘fire’ from the YMCA.
The brake lights continued to work after the strike.
The upward streamer from the ground will have come from the two street lights that the car past under as the lightening struck, the suv will have completed the circuit, you can make out the flash of the streamers from the street lights in the video if you look closely.
@ur momisugly John Pickens says:
September 27, 2012 at 8:40 am
Makes you wonder about the EMP disaster scenarios from both manmade and sun-caused events. I know that power lines and EMP are a potentially huge problem, but cars and consumer electronics, I’m not so sure.
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I used to have a wrist watch that would reset itself whenever there was a big solar flare. It got to where I would notice it had reset itself again, then go look at the spaceweather.com page for solar flares, and – sure enough – there was a solar flare at about the time it had reset.