So I guess it really IS Braking news.
Posted on 07/03/2023 4:57:23 PM PDT by bluescape
Does anyone know if the myth of lightning striking the ground causing a shock to someone say in the bathtub or washing in the sink is true?
Supposedly it could strike the metal pipes underground and travel up the line to connect with the bathtub you're in.
I've found myself waiting for a storm to pass just in case, but it might be hogwash. On the other hand I know someone who saw a person struck by lightning and it killed the crap out of them. I'd hate to learn the truth of this from experience.
When I was a kid, a house a few doors over had a direct hit. I remember going over there and I think it completely blew out their electrical system... I remember in one of the bedrooms, the electrical outlets were completely burnt. One would think there must have been arcing and fireballs everywhere.
A few years ago, I lost the heating elements in a water heater in a storm... electrician said it wasn’t all that uncommon.
“We always stayed away from sinks and tubs when kids.”
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Hi Grame, I like your post. Kids can be WAY to clean indeed...
So I read your bio: even better than your post; thank you.
BUT one time a lightning strike hit a transformer near my house.
It fried the phone, one of my TVs, and my modem.
Newsflash. ‘Braking News is spelled Breaking news’.
Depends on how fast you need it broken.
No matter what, your only ever probably okay. It’s the best you can expect and hope for.
I havent seen that in a long time but I do know that when my grandmother had her party line that when lightning would strike it could wipe out a chunk of the countrysides communication along with the attached phones.
I once had a tech support call from someone whose backup floppies got mysteriously erased. It turns out that they were stored in a metal file cabinet, and that lightning struck or went through the room during a storm.
We heard of similar results with vacuum cleaners being used near metal file cabinets containing magnetic media.
Yes, this was back in the early 90s when floppies were still a thing.
Way back in the olden days, up in the rolling hills of another state, I was at the kitchen sink washing my hands. The house was quite ancient. It was storming out but not dreadful. On either side of the sink by a few feet were electrical sockets, one had a small night light in it. Lightening struck the tree outside the window above the sink, the lightening shot out both electrical sockets, blew the nightlight across the room (it was toasted) and scared sh*t out of me, hair was standing up for real. I didn’t get any electrical hit but I was afraid to turn the water off, LOL, so I used a wooden ruler to push the faucets shut. Needless to say I avoided the kitchen during thunderstorms after that while living there. I had heard in such old houses the lightening would travel the water pipes if there was a direct hit. I don’t think you’d run into those problems now a days with updated building codes. I now live in the lightening capital of the US, LOL, and have no fear of taking a shower during a storm.
Way back when I was a teenaged ham radio operator, I was sitting in my basement during a thunderstorm. I kept hearing a ‘snap-snap’ behind some equipment on my desk. I looked, and saw the end of cable connected to a hundred foot long antenna outside. It happened to be disconnected from the radio gear. The ‘snap’ was coming from the 1/4 inch gap between the wires at the end of the cable. Touching the wires would have given me as much of a zap as touching a spark plug wire on a motor.
There was no lightning hitting the antenna. The sparking was simply due to electrostatic buildup in the air, a precursor to a lightning strike. The ‘snapping’ likely was helping prevent a lightning strike. Underground buried pipes would likely continuously discharge any static buildup along their length. That’s not to say, though, that there might be circumstances where similar conditions might occur. In fact, plastic pipes might even allow the conductive water within the pipes to conduct a static charge into a house while insulating it from continuous discharge underground.
Electrons will flow from high potential to low potential. The high potential is the REGION in the clouds from which the lightning originates and the low potential is the SURFACE on the ground to which it discharges. You tend to see lightning come from many points above to one relatively small plane below.
The only way to get electrocuted in the tub is if the path of discharge happens to be through the tub water.
So when lightning lands next to your house, by definition,it’s not travelling through the tub water because your tub is in the house, not next to it. The nearby lighting discharge path will not create a potential in the tub itself.
If it hits your house, the discharge path is still mostly vertical because the lowest potential is the ground itself. Most of that energy will be expended close to where it actually hits the outside of the structure, which is what causes fire or you could possibly even lose the top of a chimney.
So I don’t think sitting in the tub is enough to do it. You’d have to be holding copper pipe AND be in a STEEL tub to get a shock. Even such, I’d think you’re more likely to get a burn on your hands in that case.
The discharge path through you would be the fractional amount between the pipe in your hands and the tub itself, which isn’t much because the best path to ground is through the rest of the pipe, not you and the tub.
With a mechanical analogy, you could think of it as a cul de sac connected to a highway with the vehicles being electrons and the roads being the discharge path. Almost all traffic is on the highway and while you’re in the cul de sac, you just watch it go by.
About 20 years ago, while we lived in the Atlanta area, lightning hit and destroyed a big tree in our front yard near the house and near the buried electric cable. The current from the strike went through the house and took out every electric appliance in the house. The guy from the electric company that came to put in a new line to the house told me that it was a good thing I was not under any running water at the time. I had just finished washing my hands when the strike occurred.
I should add to post 92 that what’s different between lightning and “typical” electrocution is that, typically, it occurs by someone contacting a source potential when grounded, whereas lightning is a discharge (not a source potential).
So being in the tub when lightning strikes is nothing like holding a live wire when in the tub. The latter will likely kill you.
Yikes! And that reminded me of an event.
About 35 years ago I took a big strike into a grove of pine trees in my front yard. About 8-10 trees had a strip of bark blown out from stem to stern. Insurance paid to have them cut down, which was nice. Neighbor’s wife was home when it happened, she thought the world was ending it was so loud and shook the house so.
I lost a Hayes IBM-PC board modem. They were nearby in Norcross, and I knew people there. One of my guys gave the dead modem to their people to do a failure analysis. They said they’d never seen a modem with so many fried components. But the computer itself was fine. Weird.
I still have some of those around here. ;-D
So I guess it really IS Braking news.
Electricity can travel through water.
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