Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeF-NH
no "recovery" needed. All hospital visits were purely precautionary. Some minor burns reported but no major injuries.
A scary incident for sure but handled well by all involved.
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To get "burns", that lightning bolt must have been
very close.
I've had lightning strike closely—
twice. Maybe, it's the reason I'm the way I am today.
1) The first time was during a tropical storm, when I'd just touched a concrete parking bumper, and a lightning bolt struck the corner of the one-story business I'd just pulled into. Being in a car, I should have gone uninjured, but I'd just reached up to close the sunroof, but the flash caused me to pull back my arm. I had a major case of "tennis-shoulder" for weeks.
We have been warned that lightning can strike 10-miles from a storm, but I suspect that it can be much further away.
2) The
second time was on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. The storm had passed by a ½-hour earlier when "a bolt from the blue" suddenly struck on the opposite side of a giant Hemlock tree I was seated under. The "bang" was extremely muted by the immense size of the Hemlock, but I remember the bright flash, and that the ground shook once, so I returned—completely unfazed—to my typing.
It was when I wandered to the other side of the Hemlock, that I was greeted with a highly-unusual sight: the branches of the understory of trees were "decorated" everywhere with 5-inch ringlets of birchbark.
Looking up, I saw that "bolt-from-the-blue" had struck a 5-inch diameter paper-birch tree—whose roots led directly to the lake. The bolt's pathway had cut down one side of the tree, and had severed dozens of those ringlets to fly away!
That was three years ago, and that birch tree is still growing well. But the "downside" was that the birch tree was only
15-feet from the Hemlock.