BE LIGHTNING and ELECTRICITY SAFE ON YOUR COUNTRY PLACE

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You can avoid harm from lightning or any electrical current by insulating it out or offering it a better route to the ground. Some materials (insulators such as rubber, brick, glass, and dry wood) hold tight to their electrons and won't easily allow a current through. Others (conductors such as your body and mine, anything wet, and most metals) happily pass along an electric current. Mother Earth herself (ground in electrical terms) is the best conductor of all.

Outdoors In a Storm

Learn to read your local weather indicators. At the approach of threatening clouds or the first distant thunderclap, get the kids out of the lake or off the jungle gym and inside a walled building or into a rubber-tired vehicle.

If you're caught out haying in a sudden electrical storm, do not seek shelter under a tree (especially if you smell metallic-spicy ozone and feel the hair on the back of your neck rise — indicating that you are in the ground field of a lightning cell). Hightail it away from trees or telephone poles and head for low ground (but not to a swamp or stream). If you are in the woods, find a clearing if you can. Move away from the tallest timber.

Drop the chain saw or hay rake and remove any exposed metal on your body (wristwatch, belt buckle, even a cap with a fabric-covered metal button on top). Don't lie or even sit, but squat on your rubber boot heels on a dry spot of ground in a knees-up/head-down crouch. Danger from direct strikes is negligible (side flashes cause the most injury), but make yourself as compact a target, with as little contact with moist ground as possible till the storm passes.

Inside the House

As soon as an electrical storm threatens, close all doors and windows. Lightning can arc through the air to the nearest conductor in the house (the TV, a radiator), while dry wood and glass are effective insulators.

Surprisingly perhaps, lightning will skip happily down chimneys. Meeting a non-conductive wood floor, brick fireplace, or slate stove board, it will arc across the room to the stereo (passing through anyone in its path). You're safest huddling on the floor in the center of a windowless room without a fireplace or stove. Never get between in-and-out conductors (say, between an open window or the fireplace and an exposed plumbing pipe).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, do not unplug appliances during an electrical storm. A powerful spike can jump out of the socket at you. Don't shower, wash, or do dishes either. Metal plumbing pipe is as effective a conductor as heavy electrical cable.

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