Sun, Rain, Rainbows, Crows, Lightning, Thunder, Full Moon Swimming
Former Member
I get to the pool a couple hours before dark and it's been warm and sunny all day, not a cloud in the sky. I'm swimming for a half-hour - 45 and getting good sun, and a fast moving rain cloud comes in and drops some water. A half-hour later one of the best rainbows I have ever seen drapes the entire eastern sky for a half hour. A faint rainbow fights to appear above the brilliant rainbow but never quite makes it. Half the sky is an eerie orange glow and makes one think of the atmosphere on planet Venus. The other half of the sky is a mixture of clouds, some dark, and dimmed sunlight. The entire sky appears low and surreal. It reminds me of the fake skies one sees in various Las Vegas casinos but 1,000 times better, and no more real. A flock of crows dots the entire ceiling and then disappears. Meanwhile, I try to keep my swimming going. The sun has still not set and I think I see a couple flashes of lightning on the distant southward horizon in the direction I am swimming. Fifteen minutes pass and I see a wicked loop of electricity in the sky above. Then the thunder. Another fifteen or so minutes and I'm swimming in darkness. The morons running the pool can't set the timer right despite repeated complaints so I'm swimming in the dark again. I drop backstroke out of my rotation after hitting my head on the side. Now I'm just doing free and fly. As I'm fly swimming the entire completely dark pool lights up off a nasty bolt of lightning. Lots more multi-tiered lightning dances in the sky and booming thunder follows. It's now hours later and I'm hearing a LOT of exploding thunder yet as I type this. Oh, ... the full moon was at the Monday night football game when I got home. They were commenting on the moon (I think it is at its closest and biggest right now) and how hot it was on the field (100º)). I don't watch much football so I switched the station and the news was about the threatening hurricane off Florida which puts things in perspective.
Parents
Former Member
A couple nights ago I tried to get some stats on swimming injuries or deaths due to lightning but I didn't have good luck. I found few reports that actually named a swimming incident (of course this does not mean it doesn't happen a lot.) At lightningsafety.noaa.gov they have a partial breakdown of 44 lightning deaths they say occurred in 2003 (and I couldn't locate stats for any other year). In it, two brothers got hit by lightning while swimming and one of them lived. Another website says roughly 100 people a year in the US are killed by lightning (that same website also says don't take a bath or a shower during a lightning storm). The below referenced site says double that (200 die a year).
Here are some of the stats listed at surviveoutdoors.com
* Most lightning strikes occur either at the beginning or the end of a storm.
* Average lightning strike is 6 miles long.
* Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees farenheit, 4 times as hot as the sun's surface.
* A cloud to ground lightning channel can be 2-10 miles long.
* Voltage in a cloud to ground strike is 100 million to one billion volts.
* Lightning is the most dangerous and frequently encountered weather hazard people experience each year.
* Lightning affects all regions. Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia and Colorado have the most lightning deaths and injuries every year.
* Lightning is the #1 cause of storm-related deaths.
* Americans are twice as likely to die from a lightning-related death than from a tornado, hurricane or flood.
* The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates there are 200 deaths and 750 severe injuries from lightning each year in the US.
* 20% of all lightning victims die from the strike.
* 70% of survivors will suffer serious long-term affects.
* Annually there are more than 10,000 forest fires caused by lightning.
In the future I'll leave the pool much quicker when I see lightning in the distance. I assumed I would be dead if I got hit which to me, in advance, is a better option than getting seriously maimed (because I wouldn't know about it). However, this now seems a rather bad assumption too. In fact, for all I know, the outdoor pool here could be a perfect place to get maimed since the bolt would most likely hit something nearby (tree or building) but perhaps a (weakened) charge would carry into the pool.
You know how we always say, "You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than ". I guess lightning hits aren't so rare. The local newspaper today says that there were hundreds of lightning bolts that reached the ground from the storm that went through here Monday and Tuesday (they actually gave an exact number). Nobody got hurt plenty of damage was done. Anyway, how do "they" know how many bolts made it to the ground?
EDIT: I just looked harder at lightningsafety.noaa.gov and I found they have some pdf files to download. In one of the two I downloaded, it has a better breakdown for 2003 which shows five different states that had one lightning death each "in water" (sounds like swimming) for 12% of the total deaths. The other file has state by state deaths from '95 to '04 but I don't see water or swimming mentioned.
A couple nights ago I tried to get some stats on swimming injuries or deaths due to lightning but I didn't have good luck. I found few reports that actually named a swimming incident (of course this does not mean it doesn't happen a lot.) At lightningsafety.noaa.gov they have a partial breakdown of 44 lightning deaths they say occurred in 2003 (and I couldn't locate stats for any other year). In it, two brothers got hit by lightning while swimming and one of them lived. Another website says roughly 100 people a year in the US are killed by lightning (that same website also says don't take a bath or a shower during a lightning storm). The below referenced site says double that (200 die a year).
Here are some of the stats listed at surviveoutdoors.com
* Most lightning strikes occur either at the beginning or the end of a storm.
* Average lightning strike is 6 miles long.
* Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees farenheit, 4 times as hot as the sun's surface.
* A cloud to ground lightning channel can be 2-10 miles long.
* Voltage in a cloud to ground strike is 100 million to one billion volts.
* Lightning is the most dangerous and frequently encountered weather hazard people experience each year.
* Lightning affects all regions. Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia and Colorado have the most lightning deaths and injuries every year.
* Lightning is the #1 cause of storm-related deaths.
* Americans are twice as likely to die from a lightning-related death than from a tornado, hurricane or flood.
* The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates there are 200 deaths and 750 severe injuries from lightning each year in the US.
* 20% of all lightning victims die from the strike.
* 70% of survivors will suffer serious long-term affects.
* Annually there are more than 10,000 forest fires caused by lightning.
In the future I'll leave the pool much quicker when I see lightning in the distance. I assumed I would be dead if I got hit which to me, in advance, is a better option than getting seriously maimed (because I wouldn't know about it). However, this now seems a rather bad assumption too. In fact, for all I know, the outdoor pool here could be a perfect place to get maimed since the bolt would most likely hit something nearby (tree or building) but perhaps a (weakened) charge would carry into the pool.
You know how we always say, "You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than ". I guess lightning hits aren't so rare. The local newspaper today says that there were hundreds of lightning bolts that reached the ground from the storm that went through here Monday and Tuesday (they actually gave an exact number). Nobody got hurt plenty of damage was done. Anyway, how do "they" know how many bolts made it to the ground?
EDIT: I just looked harder at lightningsafety.noaa.gov and I found they have some pdf files to download. In one of the two I downloaded, it has a better breakdown for 2003 which shows five different states that had one lightning death each "in water" (sounds like swimming) for 12% of the total deaths. The other file has state by state deaths from '95 to '04 but I don't see water or swimming mentioned.
