Lightning Safety Guide

Including what to do if you get caught in a thunderstorm while hiking or biking

When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors, but not just any indoors will do.  You want a substantial building with grounded electrical and without a concrete floor (because there are wires and pipes in the concrete walls and floors).  

Your biggest risk with a lightning strike is brain injury, not burns as you might suspect.  Don’t touch anything metal and avoid water.

 Best Lightning Safety Tips

• Check the forecast and plan accordingly
• Learn to read clouds and remember that dark clouds can be on the other side of the mountain but you can’t see them yet
• If clouds are building and have crisp edges, it could be the build up of a storm
• Lightning can hit ten miles from the storm. If you hear thunder, take immediate shelter 
• Use the 30/30 Rule:  After you see lightning, start counting to 30. If you hear thunder before you reach 30, go indoors. Suspend activities for at least 30 minutes after the last clap of thunder.
• A lightning strike 100’ away can travel on top of the grounds and can still kill you
• Inside of a car with a metal roof and windows up is safe but don’t touch anything metal

When indoors:

• Avoid concrete floors and walls. Don’t lie on the floor or lean against the wall
• Don’t use any electrical equipment like corded phones (cell phones are ok), plugged in computers, etc. 
• Avoid plumbing, including sinks, baths and faucets. DO NOT SHOWER
• Stay away from windows and doors, and stay off porches

If you are caught outside with no safe shelter anywhere nearby,

the following actions may reduce your risk:

If you hear thunder, it’s time to take precautions even if you think it’s far away.  Get off the ridge and below treeline. You do not want to be the tallest thing out there and a beacon for a strike.

• ·       Immediately get off elevated areas such as hills, mountain ridges or peaks.
• ·       Never lie flat on the ground.
• ·       Never shelter under an isolated tree.
• ·       Never use a cliff or rocky overhang for shelter. That attractive looking rock cave might keep you from getting wet, but rocks are full of minerals – think iron or copper- and thus are a great conduit for the lightening to get you.  Better to get wet and stay alive, then stay dry but dead.
• ·      Immediately get out and away from ponds, lakes and other bodies of water.
• ·      A depression might help you stay low, but do not stay in a place that might have a flash flood
• ·      Stay away from objects that conduct electricity (barbed wire fences, power lines, windmills, etc.).
• ·      Take off your back pack, put any metal jewelry or metal belt buckles, metal cameras, phone, tripod, etc.  Put it 100’ from you along with your hiking poles. Don’t forget your tent has metal poles.  
• Crouch down onto the balls of your feet with heels up and hold your knees to minimize your height and your contact with the ground.  If you get hit, you hope that it rolls off your back and away from your core. Cover your ears with your hands and close your eyes.
• If in a group, spread out so you minimize the risk that everyone gets hit (get 15 – 30 yards or more apart) so someone can get help or provide medical help if someone gets hit.  What to do if someone gets hit:
• If there is a strike nearby, call out to make sure everyone is safe.  If someone got hit, then begin first aid. 
• There is no danger of you getting electrocuted by that original strike, so you can touch them.
• Administer CPR if they aren’t breathing.  You have a good chance of bringing them back
• Treat for any burns  Be sure to remove socks and Inspect feet and toes for burns.
•  Treat for shock :  Put a blanket if avail, otherwise, cover with extra clothes and raincoat
• Check out the Wilderness First Aid episode 

Podcast Complete Transcript

NOTE:  This transcript is an unedited machine transcription and so will have numerous boo boos.  I provide this as a courtesy to those that prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast.  Thanks for your understanding about any typos, etc:)

When Jennifer Pharr Davis, the first woman to get the overall fastest Appalachian trail hike record. I believe it was on her first. I think she’s done it several times now, but the first time that she solo through hiked it, she was just changing. And one of the shelters when lightning struck, fortunately she survived to tell the tale, but not everybody does. There’s lots of different ways that you could protect yourself, both in the wild and if you’re able to seek shelter. But she probably thought she was pretty safe. So there it’ll lead to what could go wrong. But unfortunately, sometimes something can today where to learn about lightning itself, why it’s such a hazard, what we should do if lightning is approaching, how we could protect ourselves, whether we are able to seek shelter or not. Sometimes we were out on a Ridge and we’ve got to figure out what to do. A storm is coming in quickly and we’ve got to figure out something to protect ourselves. So today we’re going to get in a nutshell, all the things that we need to know about lightning and how to keep ourselves safe. So let’s get started.

Welcome to the Adventure Travel Show podcast of your host kid parks. And today we’re going to be learning everything we need to know about lightning and how to protect ourselves if you haven’t done so already. How about hitting the pause button and push the subscribe button for both this, the adventure travel show where I teach you the how tos of adventure travel and the act of travel adventures podcast, right, teach you about cool destinations all around the world, so please subscribe to both and tell your friends. I sure would appreciate it. I guess a good place to start is to define what exactly is lightning. I know it’s pretty, but what is it exactly? It turns out that lightning is a naturally occurring electrostatic discharge when in the atmosphere when it’s unsettled to electrically charge regions temporarily equalize themselves causing this instantaneous release of huge amounts of energy that manifests as lightning lightening desks.

While not common do kill about 30 people each year in the U S alone on average, and not surprisingly due to storms, et cetera. Most of those strikes are East of the Mississippi, but also Texas and a few in the Midwest get hit as well. But surprisingly a third of lightning strikes are actually inside of a building. Lightning hits the U S over 25 million times each year. One question people always ask, how can you tell how far the lightning is? If you want to measure the distance of lightning, when you see that flash count the seconds between the flash and the thunder and divided by five and that number is roughly how many miles lightning is from you. Lightning can strike as much as 10 miles away. So whenever you hear thunder, that’s the indication is time to seek shelter or you protect yourself in some way. In fact, many of the victims that are hit, we’re so close to getting to that shelter when were actually struck. So when you hear thunder as time to take some kind of preventative measures, there’s five ways that lightning can hit you. The first one is the one that we’re most familiar with and that’s the direct hit. And generally speaking, this is when you’re out in an open area, you are the tallest thing around and so you are where the lightning bolt chooses to reach the ground via.

Yeah.

In a little bit later I’m going to show you how to protect yourself if you find yourself in that situation and what position you need to take. Because the goal is if you’re going to get hit, you want to minimize your body space because when you have a direct strike, you want that bolt to be in your body as short a time as possible and ideally you’d rather have it travel over you like over your back versus going through your internal organs cause that’s where most of the severe damage comes from. So a direct strike is the first kind of lightning. The second way is called a side flash or side splash. This generally happens when somebody says, Oh, I think I’m going to take shelter from the rain under a tree. So lightning strikes the tree if you’re like within a foot or two.

Generally speaking of the lightning strike, that’s when the bolt itself will do a little side action so that a little bit of that lightning just jumps off of the main bolt and goes and gets you the third way. This is a really deadly one. This is the ground current and this ones can be really tricky. So let’s say lightning strikes a tree nearby, but then the bolt itself and the electricity courses across the ground, okay, so this can hit you from, you know, a hundred feet away. So that’s a little bit scary. In fact, that’s the way most livestock are killed. And again, the reason is because that bolt is through their body. And let’s say it’s a cow, it’s going up one leg where it’s closest to the strike and then going down another leg, which is far away. So it has a long time in the body, relatively speaking. And that’s why so many livestock get killed by lightning. Again, we’re going to get down to that. Our position, we’ll learn a little bit later how to minimize our body so that if we are struck, it has the shortest distance possible to get back to the ground.

The fourth way is conduction and this is a way that people get hurt inside of a house. Uh, it’s when the lightning strike hits it, but then it conducts the electricity through wires or pipes. Like I said, about a third of all lightning strikes are actually somebody inside the house. And it used to be a lot worse when everybody had courted phones. Lots and lots of people, about 10 times more people each year were getting killed by lightning strikes because they’re on the phone, on the landline when lightning struck and it just weren’t right to their brain. So again, we’re going to go bit by bit on both indoors and outdoors what to do. But in a nutshell, to avoid the conduction, you don’t want to be touching anything that is metal or has wires or plumbing, metal plumbing at all during any type of funder. Storm activity,

the diary member back, Oh, this has got to be 15 probably closing on 20 years ago. My late husband bill and I were sitting out in the porch, which you’ll learn later is not a smart thing to do during a storm. We’re just playing cards and there was a beautiful storm going on and boom, our house got hit and we have a tin roof. We lived in old to Tom’s a hundred year old farmhouse at the time and in a split second we saw all sorts of little like Tinder’s like a sparkle bits of Bern came down. I don’t know, must have been from one of the lightning rods on the thing. I don’t know what it was. Well we just saw a little bits of sparkle of, of burnt Emory kind of things sprinkled down and in a split second everything plugged in our house got fried. Our heat pump, the washing machine, the computer that I had spent a lot of money on. One of these fancy direct strike lightning strike backups that fried the computer, fried all of my work for years on my nursery, which of course at the time I didn’t back up cause I didn’t know how to do it. I lost a couple of years of work there that dates at 19 1997 is when we got hit and it was a huge wake up call to how instantaneously lightning can change your life.

So the conduction, which is what happened in our house and it just like I said, literally fried. Everything we owned that was plugged in from phones to electrical was all done in a split second.

So that conduction, that one I remember vividly. And then the last one is not very common, but this is, it’s called a streamer strike. And this is when the main boat goes down. There’s some little side spurts on that. And when the lightning bolt, the main bolt hits, the streamers were also hit at the same time. And if you happen to be in the line of that streamer, that’s when you can get hit. It’s not very common, but it is a method of getting hit by lightning. So now that we know what lightning is and the five different kinds of lightning, let’s review a couple of general lightning tips and then we’re going to drill down to what you should do if you’re able to get to shelter. And what do you do if you’re not, you’re exposed, you’re out of the woods and here comes a storm.

So in general, remember lightening can strike as much as 10 miles away from the storm. So when you hear that thunder as time for you to take the precautions and try to take quality shelter if possible. And one thing you want to do is do the 30 30 rule. And what that means is once you see lightning, start counting to 30 and if you hear thunder anytime before you’ve reached 30 seconds, you need to seek shelter. And then afterwards suspend any activities outdoors for at least 30 minutes after the last time you hear a clap of thunder.

Okay?

And remember a very safe place to be is inside of a car with a metal roof with the windows up and then don’t touch anything metal and then you’re pretty safe in that car. So let’s say you had the opportunity to seek shelter when a storm is coming. What do you look for? What are you going to,

counter-intuitively you want to avoid buildings that have a concrete floor. And the reason for that is sometimes wires and plumbing are in those floors or even in the walls. So whenever possible, you don’t want to be on a concrete pad and you don’t want that. So you don’t want to lie on a concrete floor. You don’t want to lean against a concrete wall and just avoid concrete whenever possible. Like we learned earlier with the electrical and the corded phones don’t use any electrical equipment. This means courted phones, but your cell phones are fine because they’re not attached to the phone. Not when it’s plugged in, obviously. But if it’s not plugged in to be charged, the cell phones are okay. You don’t want to touch any plugged in computers. You don’t want to touch plugged in televisions, anything plugged into the wall, don’t touch it. You also want to avoid any plumbing. This includes sinks. Don’t take a shower, don’t touch the faucets. Anything metal is a conduit and water is a great conduit for electricity. You also want to stay away from your windows and doors. And as I learned doing my research, I should not have been on the porch with bill when that lightning hit the house. But what happens if you’re caught outside and you have no safe shelter anywhere? These following actions can help you reduce your risk and reduce the severity if you happen to get struck.

So remember, anytime you hear thunder, it’s time to take precautions. Even if you think it’s so far away, can’t possibly hurt you 10 miles and it could still get you. If you’re up on a Ridge, you need to get down below treeline immediately. You do not ever want to be the tallest thing out there that just makes you a beacon for a lightning strike. But before you even had out, check the forecast and make your plans accordingly. In my area, that thunderstorms tend to roll in late afternoon and the mountains, they might come in right after lunchtime, so know what the forecast is, and if you know that in the afternoon there’s a risk of a thunderstorm, get up early. Get up in the summit, head back down so you’re down before the clouds build up. Remember that dark clouds could also be on the other side of the mountain. Anytime you see those dark clouds forming, particularly, they get that crisp edge that’s a thunderstorm brewing and learn to read the clouds. Don’t forget that a lightning strike a hundred feet away can travel on top of the ground and still get you to be careful. You never, ever, ever want a live flat on the ground. You never want to take shelter under an isolated tree. Remember when it can do that little sidestep and get you

okay?

Never use a cliff or Rocky overhang for shelter. I know that it looks really attractive going in that rock cave and it might keep you from getting wet, but don’t forget rocks are full of minerals. Think about iron, copper, so that makes them a great conduit for the lightening and that can get you, it’s much better to be wet and stay alive than be dry and dead.

You want to immediately get out of any ponds, lakes or any other bodies of water there. Reminds me when my brother was taken us out in the catamaran and enroll the storm with like no notice and so was bill board and my brother and myself and I’m like, we are in the open water with a gotta be a 20 foot mast. I said aluminum. I said, we are the beacon of light and it’s like go board and go get us back to shore as soon as possible. I was really scared. So you want to get away from all water as soon as possible.

Okay.

A depression might help you stay low, but you want to be careful that you don’t stay in a place that might get a flash flood. So just use good judgment there. You want to stay away from any objects that can conduct electricity, think barbwire fences, power lines, windmills, et cetera. So avoid anything metallic, anything wet.

Okay?

You want to take off your backpack, take any metal jewelry, your metal belt buckles, any Mel, your camera’s got metal in, your phone’s got cam metal in it, tripods. Get all that at least a hundred feet away from you, including your hiking poles. And don’t forget that your tents got metal poles in it as well to get all the mental things away from you at least a hundred feet. And this next part is super important. So pay attention if you’re doing something else while you’re listening to this, this is the key thing you need to make sure you remember the position that you take if you’re caught in a lightning storm outside.

So let’s say you are exposed, you are now drown. Hopefully you’ve gotten down below tree line so you’re not the tallest thing out there. You want to look for medium sized trees. If you, if you’re stuck in the woods and then you crouch down onto the balls of your feet, so on the front part of your feet, get your heels up off the ground and you want to hold your knees tucked down your head. You are trying to minimize your body size. You’re minimizing your height and you’re minimizing your contact with the ground and your goal is if you get hit, you’re hoping that it’s going to roll off your back and away from your core. Also cover your ears at their hands and close your eyes.

I’m not sure why they tell you to close your eyes, but maybe just say you won’t be so scared. I remember my parents were out hiking one day and they came across this man who was so wild-eyed and they thought he was crazy. And it turns out that he had been backpacking his very first time and got stuck in a lightning storm where the bolts were just hitting the ground all around him and he was so beside himself with fear and craze that they finally got him calmed down, hit the, my parents were the first person this guy saw once, he made it through the night and he had just had a terrifying night experience. So if you find yourself in that situation, you want to get in that crouch position, remember that that could save your life. If you happen to be in a group, you want to spread out. So you’re minimize the risk that everybody happens to get hit. You want to get 15 to 30 yards or more apart from each other. And that way if somebody does get hit, someone else could go get help or provide medical care.

Okay.

And if you hear a strike in the area, call out to make sure everybody’s safe. And of course if somebody got hit, it’s okay to begin first aid, there’s no chance of you getting electrocuted by that original strike, so you’re allowed to touch them. What do you do if they get hit? Three things to look for. Number one, if they’re not breathing, administer CPR, and I’ll have links to all this in the show notes. Of course, if they aren’t breathing and you administer CPR, you actually have a pretty good chance to bring them back. You want to treat them for Randy Burns. Surprisingly, it’s the brain damage, the brain injury that actually causes more problems than the burns. But look for burns, take off their shoes and socks and make sure they’re not burned on their feet. You also need to treat them for shock. Put a blanket over them of are available. Otherwise, cover them with extra clothes and raincoat, whatever you’ve got. Help to keep them warm and again, take the time to go to the website and check out the links that I have of what to do to help somebody cause you don’t have time when you’re out in the wild to get that information. It’s better to read up on it and know ahead of time.

So what are the kinds of things that can happen to you if you get hit by lightning? Surprising like I said, it’s the brain injury that affects a lot of people where they’ll have memory issues, tremors. Um, I went to a website when I was doing research on this and there’s a lot of really bad side effects to lightning strikes. So it is something that you want to take caution with. The burns are a factor, but that’s like I said, the thing that affects the people that survive a lightning strike the most is the brain damage that can happen. The burns can heal, but sometimes that brain damage lingers on for life. It’s also severe internal core damage. That’s why we always want to minimize our body size in hopes that it has the quickest path to get back to the ground or, or ideally even roll off our back, which is probably what happened to Jen. The woman I spoke to at the beginning of this program for her to survive that.

Yeah.

So lightening is not something to be tinkered with. It not something to be toyed with. It needs to be taken seriously, so you’ll have the best chance of avoiding a lightning strike, or if you do get struck to surviving that lightning strike. I think this is an important episode for all of us outdoor lovers, so hope that you will share it with your friends because again, it’s something you want to know what to do before this happens because you’re not going to have a lot of time to think. So remember what to do when you have the shelter opportunities, and then more importantly, what to do if you don’t. I sure do appreciate you listening and I hope you got a lot of information out of this day’s episode. Until next time, this is kit parks adventure on.