Wildest lightning strike I've ever seen

carrying a senior Russian official on a rainy Russian day
It was the vodka. Its not called white lightning for nothing.

Back in 1975, I was working for Green Giant Co. Ripon WI, as a field mechanic during peas, beans, and sweet corn harvesting seasons. We had a hard rain fall one day, that made harvesting impossible as the equipment was constantly getting stuck in the mud. The pea combine drivers were sent home, the foreman left the field, and I stayed behind to finish repairing a broken combine. There was a small bit of lightning on the horizon but none within 10 miles of the field site…. no problem!
A light rain was falling as I was stretched out under the broken combine, welding up a cracked frame member. I had a rubber rain coat under me to keep me off the wet ground and another one pulled over me to roll the hot sparks from the welding off of me as they fell. Of course, with a welders face shield over my head much of the time, my attention focused on the weld repair, and a noisy portable welder unit running near by, I wasn’t aware that another squall line was moving into the area.
The repair was progressing fairly well….. until a hickory tree in the fence row about 100 feet away was hit by lightning! The concussion sent me crab scuttling sidewise out from under the combine to see what had blown up! The tree had a steaming strip of barkless trunk about 2 inches wide running into the ground and up to the branches near the top. Bits of steaming bark had been blown out into the field and even the dirt had been blown up off of the root that had carried the the charge ‘to ground’! I could hardly hear my gas engine powered welder running, from the thunder clap after effects on my hearing.
I climbed into my mechanics truck for shelter and, after my hearing had returned to something approaching normal, I called the Green Giant mechanics shop (business band radio, “Truck 304 to Base….”) to tell them I was packing up and heading in to the plant. “Did you get that combine repaired?” I was asked. “No.” I replied. “Why are you coming in before the job is finished?” they queried. “Because I just had a direct order from God telling me it was time to quit!” I replied. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there…”
Ahhhhh……. the Good Old Days!

Our house got hit some years ago. The bolt hit the gable of our bedroom. It blew bricks off the gable. I slept through it.

_Jim:
“Ummm … no. It begins as a chaotic process involving gas molecules in a strong static electric field, with free electrons stripped from some gas molecules which begin to impinge on other gas molecules and at some point an ‘avalanche’ effect takes over eventually resulting in a ‘plasma path’ through which the bulk of the electron ‘charge’ is transferred.”
Basically, isn’t that what I said about the pointed umbrella and ions? I still say that lightning always follows the path of least resistance, cloud to ground or vice versa, and you are correct that ion streamers, “plasma paths”, caused by the local electric field strength are what weaken the resistance making that path the least one (but usually multi-branched and rarely a straight one). Also, there are usually even much smaller and weaker sub paths dissipating the change differences.

As long as we’re telling stories.
Weather permitting I always watch thunderstorms outside.
Once had lightning hit REALLY close, I instantly smelled burning hair.
It wasn’t mine, I checked.
??

eyesonu, more likely it would seems. Wasn’t it Franklin who discovered that sharp points on lightning rods were much better than smooth surfaces in drawing the lightning to itself?
Speaking of masts, I had a pretty large sailboat for over twenty years and never had a problem with lightning, but I guess that because the twenty-five foot mast was not stepped on the lead ballast but on the upper deck giving about a four foot gap that was merely a large dry timber within the cabin. But in stormy weather, and I did a lot of that running under storm jib only, I always made sure not to list too much, putting one of the stays down and very close to the water for that very reason.
I suppose on the open ocean or great lakes without trees nearby on the shore you would probably be a much greater target for a lightning hit. That ‘path of least resistance’ rule has never let me down to date. ☺

Well Lightning strikes are a static electricity phenomenon; well; until it decides to zap you.
So whether it is a go or no go, is a question of static electric fields.
And I’m flabbergasted that nobody here seems to know the key parameters. The electric field near a charged wire is inversely proportional to the local radius of curvature of the wire, or 1/r^2 for three dimensional curvature so that is why it is sharply pointed objects that promote a breakdown of the air. Obviously nobdy seems to have smashed their plasma T&V screen yet. The plasma cells inside that display, use field emission electron sources. There are sharp points inside each pixel to create an electron beam under high electric fields.
So the usual advice if caught out in the open, in an electric storm, is to make yourself look like a “hemispherical boss on an infinite plan”e, so you should get down on the ground in the fetal position and make your self look as round as you can. Don’t worry, at those sort of electric fields, the lightning sees you as a perfect conductor.
Another example of the phenomenon is the Geiger counter, which consists of a very fine usually Tungsten wire in the center of a metallized glas cylinder. A high Voltage is applied between the wire and the surface metallization, so it sets up an electric field that increases in strength the closer it is to the wire. When an ionizing particle strikes a gas atom in the cyclinder (low pressure) it ionizes the gas, and electrons are swept towards the wire, with the ions then drifting towards the glass. If the Voltage is high enough the electrons accelerate enough to ionize another atom or molecule, so that the current can be greater than just the number of electrons released in the original ionization event. In this range, it is usually called a proportional counter, and the total charge released is proportional to the energy of the ionizing particle, so it is using positive feedback to create a charge gain.
At higher Voltages still, the electrons gain energy so fast, that they create a veritable avalanche of charge, and the ionisation starts right at the tube wall. In this mode, the thing is totally non-linear, and the same total chage is released from the very first ionisation event, no matter what the energy. This is the Geiger region, and the pulses are now saturated and independent of ionising radiation energy. Such tubes can also detect non charged particles like neutrons and gamma rays. The incoming neutron strikes an atom and kicks out a proton from the nucleus. This “knock on” proton then starts the accelerated charge ionisation process. In the case of gamma rays (high energy photons), it is an electron that is kicked out of the atom. Proportional counter tubes designed for neutron detection usually contain carboniferous gases and materials, because carbon is a good source of knock on protons . Even so, proportional gas counters for neutrons are quite inefficient, and maybe only count one in 10^4 neutrons, but they can be made totally insensitive to gamma radiation. Modern scintillation crytals and materials like Anthracene and Stilbene are much better neutron detectors.
Bt it is that 1/r electric field or 1/r^2 for spherical points that promotes the discharge. I believe there are some quite recent papers, that show the lightning rod process is somewhat more complicated than just the sharp point business.
But once the zap gets going it will go where it damn well pleases

TomRude says: September 27, 2012 at 8:22 am
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.
Done. Like I did (thanks to someone else’s find of the article on the Wayback Machine) for Tim Ball, an even more scandalous deletion by WhackaPedia.

Some one mentioned that an aircraft is also a good faraday cage, that can depend on your definition of good. In a 727 as a flight engineer out of darwin, a rather tropical place we faced thunderstorms to 70,000ft with with no gaps. We were climbing and descending at 10,000ft per minute without doing anything when the lightning started.
Then it got interesting, it fried and blew off or up every aerial on the aircraft and took out the electrical system. Thus we had a boy scout compass on the combing panel and a battery that powered enough instruments to tell us which way was up for twenty minutes. So far a lot of fun then the saint Elmo’s fires crept all over the cockpit.
That was special, could hardly see the instruments and everyones hair was standing on end, that was the fun part, the turbulence was so rapid that we suffered eye ball bounce whereby your eyes can not keep up with the movement, blurred vision and creepy green fire was a tad surreal.
We were continually struck by lightning maybe five hundred times by the burn marks later counted.
The problem of no generating power was the foremost problem, Boeing in their wisdom made the system such that the fault that shut down the generators could only be reset by turning off the battery and thus not knowing which way was up. That was a gamble, not knowing if it would turn back on again, that was a small problem, the blurred vision and the hands going up and down trying to manipulate switches and circuit breakers was a real challenge.
We survived and arrived with one generator and two fried ones and an aircraft with almost nothing working, lightning is not very friendly. Willis’s thunder storms to get rid of the heat are a reality.

@Paul Jackson
>…if it were a Faraday cage your cell phone would not get any reception while inside the car.
Unless, as explained above, the openings in the cage are larger than about 1/4 of a wavelength in which case the signel passes right through. A radio wave ‘reflector’ does not have to be a solid object, only have holes smaller than 1/4 of a wavelength such as chicken wire and a TV signal.
That is why a microwave oven has a perforated metal plate behind the glass in the door. It keeps all the microwaves inside because the hole is much smaller than the wavelength of the EM bouncing around inside.