Darn lightning....

[Michael]

I was speaking with a professor from UF in gainesville and he told me that
researchers at UF had found that, contrary to popular belief, lightening
strikes rarely take the shortest path to ground. He said they found that
there are many factors including atmospheric pressure.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 3:30 AM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, 01 Jun 2016 20:34:55 -0700
> Brian Cluff <Brian at Snaptek.com> wrote:
>
>
> > I wish I still had this CD ROM drive that I used to show off when
> > lightning came up in conversation.  Most of the traces were
> > completely melted off its circuit board... and the computer that it
> > was plugged into was also plugged into a really nice surge suppressor.
>
> Supposedly Central Florida, where I live, is the lightning capital of
> the world. One day I sat on the front porch, enjoying a rainstorm, even
> after my wife told me to come inside before I get struck by lightning.
>
> Then there was one of those boom-flashes where the book and the flash
> were simultaneous, my wife came to the front door, and told me our back
> yard had been struck by lightning. Here's what I found:
>
> There was a 15 foot and rising mushroom cloud of smoke rising from an
> 18 inch hole in the ground. A few feet from the hole was the metal dog
> leash cable whose top pulley rode on a 50 foot horizontal metal cable
> stretched between two trees. Several inches of the leash that had been
> touching the ground were vaporized.
>
> Following the horizontal cable, I saw that the tree on the right had
> burn marks from where the cable was attached to midway up the tree, but
> a tree about 6 feet away had burn marks from that height to its top.
>
> The lightning had hit one tree, jumped to the tree with the horizontal
> wire, across the horizontal wire to the vertical leash, down the leash
> to blow a hole in the ground and vaporize several inches of the leash.
> Luckily, our dog hadn't been on it at the time.
>
> I found out later that my neighbor had been standing about 10 feet from
> the trees that got hit, on his own property. The electrical field had
> knocked him to the ground.
>
> The itercom system that came with our house failed. Both trees that got
> hit died a few weeks later.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> May 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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-- 
:-)~MIKE~(-:
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