Lightning drill?
 

So what's your lightning drill? Today I was about 5 minutes from home when a storm really started. I just went a bit faster and nearly pissed my pants. Also, I was a bike salmon for a bit; I did not want to have to wait to turn left on a busy road.

Is there a proper way to go about preventing death by lightning? I know in the wild you're supposed to sit on your pack, but I wasn't carrying a big bag.

Riding on an aluminum bike isn't reassuring. If only I had a carbon fiber bike... *sigh*

The odds I've seen from getting struck by lighting range from about 1:250000 to 1:750000. Not very high. Unless I were riding on an exposed mountain top or on a wide open plain, I would simply seek cover as reasonably quickly as I could while still riding safely.

If you think riding carbon fiber or even a plastic framed bike will change the odds of getting hit even fractionally, you're insanely optimistic.

I just don't worry about it. I look at it this way; my house has a TV antenna on top of it, 30 feet in the air, grounded steel pipe sticking straight up. It's been standing here for 17 years now through every thunderstorm. I've seen lightning strike within 30 feet of it, and yet the house still hasn't been hit, nor have any of the trees.

What are the odds that I'll get hit, a badly conducting body with a round top 6 feet off the ground, moving too fast for an ion trail to form anyway? Yes, it happens, but the odds are far less than me getting hit by a car on any given day.

If I were living in Florida where I understand at times the lighting strikes a thousand times an hour in a single area, I might worry more about it.

Agreed, the bike makes no difference. If you were riding a horse you'd be at the same risk. Make a reasonable b-line for home and stop worrying.

If you're worried about getting hit by lightning, you probably think you have a good chance of winning the lottery, too.

Yes, your odds of being struck by lightening while cycling are pretty low. If you'd like to lower them even more just ask a taller partner to join you on storm rides. :p

hmm, while statistics are comforting in a general sense, lightning is not random. You are in an area where it is likely (a front) and you are exposed. Hundreds manage to get hit each year, you can reduce your odds. I don't know of any bike specific ideas, but not being the tallest (only) object in the middle of a road layout seems like a good idea. Not taking shelter under a tallest object is also a good idea. I've been in similar place and decided to beat it for home, which wasn't far. On my rural/suburban commute, If I was more than a few minutes from home, I've thought of holding on the side of the road far enough from a tree that if it fell it would come near me....(thinking it would be the tallest thing and not me, while staying far enough from it not to be zapped if it was hit)

Those aren't the actual odds for the OP because they're probably averaged over every american.

If you have the odds from the particular circumstance of a cyclist in a lightning storm, then give those instead.

You can't win the lotto if you don't play.

The odds of you "winning" the lightning lotto shoot way up if you're outside and shoot way down if you're like the majority of people sampled in those stats - safe and indoors.

If things get too hairy i'll crouch into a ball in a ditch, but generally I check the radar if i'm going a fair distance something is amiss and just wait 30 minutes... the weather typically changes around here in that time-frame.

Mine is to wish I had my camera ( and a tripod and cable release ). We don't get lightening much here, and when we do, it's typically only visible over the horizon and reflected in the clouds. It's not anything I need to worry about.

Do you have a kick-stand? If not, you might want to think about installing one. If things get worrisome, you can stand your bike up ( as long as it isn't too windy ) and lay yourself down several feet away. It'll double as a lightening rod.

I like this one.

I go more slowly if it is a good lightning storm, and we get some great ones here. The reason I go more slowly is so I wont crash while I am looking around :)

I love lightning.

z

The only times I have been overly concerned about lightning is once stuck in a small boat in the middle of a very large lake, never worried about it on the bike, and I live in Florida. I would maybe worry more if I was out in the open somewhere but that is rarely the case here.

Funny you should mention that. It was not on a commute to work but on a tour this year. I got caught in a thunder/lightning storm in Alabama. To hide from the pounding rain I leaned up against a rock/bluff. As the ditch I was standing in filled up with water, lightning struck the ground across the street. Yep, I felt that one AND the next one! I didn't get hit directly but I felt an indirect jolt. My hands and feet were numb for 2 months.

The shock was a surprise. The claps of thunder so close actually bothered me more.

I guess I didn't learn much. I still run/bike in the rain. :D

Jerry H

I came to an agreement with Lightning many years ago......I ignore it, and it ignores me. So far, we have both kept our respective parts of the bargain.

How do you know it has not been hit? Your TV antenna and steel pipe are grounded. They are designed to pass the lightning right into the earth. The point is that you would not notice.

I worry about lightning....its on the list of things I worry about while rideing
heres a quick scan of the list
1 car doors
2 inattentive drivers
3 speeders

further down

52 Alien abduction resulting in anal probeing
53 lightening strikes

there it is....knew it was on there somewhere

:)

On a tour, I had lighning strike close enough that I felt the "tingle" just before the big, bright "my God, they dropped the big one" flash.

I wasn't hurt, except for some serious ringing in my ears, but I dang near "dropped the big one" myself...

The TV antenna isn't so well grounded that they wouldn't notice. Antenna strike = fried TV

I was in the first third of my 19 mi commute home the other night when it started raining. Big lightning show. I kept riding. Lots of taller structures around me. Thought about getting off the road to get out of the rain in case it was just a passing shower, but ended up trudging on.

If I get hit my lightning on a bike, it is the godz will. If I survive a lightning hit on a bike, I will indeed buy lottery tickets...

I've been to houses where the antenna was hit. It melted the insulation down on the coax and EXPLODED the splitter and anything else attached.

In an electrical circuit where there's a low resistance path to ground and a high resistance one, yes, MOST of the electricity will pass through the low resistance path (the ground wire). However, a fraction of the energy will pass through the high resistance path, and a fraction of a lightning strike is still more than enough to cause physical damage to electronics.

We had a lighting strike on our property a few years ago; the strike hit the ground very close to the buried wire for the dog's invisible fence and also within a couple of feet of where the cable TV coax goes through, about 100 feet from the house (we use cable only for internet, it's not hooked to the TVs). In that case, not only was there a good path to ground, it was HITTING the ground. Even so, just the side leakage from that strike snuck into the coax, blew the splitter apart, fried the cable modem, went through that to fry the router, went through that and blew the ethernet ports on 3 machines. It also got into the buried invisible fence wire and destroyed the insulation along the entire 1500 foot line as the charge broke it down every few inches, and even with all that leakage into ground, enough energy made it into the transmitter box for the fence to actually physically blow components off the circuit board, melt the wire going to the power supply wall wart, blew the cover off the wall wart and shredded the wires in the transformer inside, and make it through the garage power lines and fry one of the two garage door openers.

That was just the side leakage from a strike. Somehow I think that if I had a direct hit on the TV antenna, I would have had at least a little damage to the TVs in the house. Or the rotor control box.

It's really rare to be struck by lightening, but then again, it's really rare to see someone riding a bike through a lightening storm.

That said, if the hair on your arms starts to stand up due to static electricity, it's time to get off the bike and lie on the ground. You don't need to sit on a backpack, just get as low as you can.

Yup, i've been hit also.

These people quoting 1:1,000,000 haven't got a clue what they're talking about. Classic sampling error.

Lightning is very dangerous - respect it or pay the price.

I stop in a store and wait out the nearby lightning if I'm more than a couple of miles from home and the the landscape of the road leaves me out in the open.

Otherwise, I just pedal like heck.

I installed an antenna on my house and grounded the pole to the main house ground in order to reduce the probability of damage to my home theater if a lightning strike hit nearby. However, a direct hit would still probably fry everything. A lightning strike near my mom's house traveled from the base of a tree to buried invisible fence wire, up to the house, over to the phone line, and destroyed the modem in her PC.