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Claim: The presence of electronic devices (such as iPods and cell phones) on one's body can make lightning strike injuries more severe.
Origins: If asked to imagine a type of injury that could result from the use of electronic devices such as iPods or cell phones, the average person might cite accidents caused by user inattentiveness, or perhaps hearing impairment brought on by a too-high volume of sound channeled through earpieces. But a lighting strike injury would probably be far, far, down on most people's lists of possibilities. While electronic devices don't attract lightning the way tall trees or lightning rods do, those struck from above while carrying or wearing them are For instance, a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine reported on the injuries sustained in 2005 by a 37-year-old jogger in Vancouver who was struck by lightning while plugged into his iPod. That unfortunate gentleman was thrown Although iPods and other electronic devices do not draw lightning down from the sky, if a person is hit while wired into one, the cataclysmic discharge of energy that would otherwise have been zapped across the outside of the body (an effect known as flashover) can travel through the unit's metallic parts and into the body, causing a greater severity of injury than otherwise would have occurred. It is the combination of metallic object in contact with human skin plus sweat that disrupts the more usual "flashover," diverting the discharge into the victim rather than merely across him. In the unfortunate jogger's case, that meant the combination of his own sweat plus the presence of metal earphones in his ears caused the extreme discharge of current to be shot through his head. In July 2006, Colorado teenage Jason Bunch endured similar (albeit less severe) injuries when lightning struck a nearby tree as he was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the lawn. Bunch had burns from the earphone wires (which "dissolved into green threads") on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in his pocket, and "a bad line up the side of [his] body," even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt. Lightning is nothing to mess with, even without one's personal electronic devices adding to its carnage. It ranks second only to floods in storm-related deaths in the United States — not even tornadoes or hurricanes top it in terms of lives lost. On average, There is a common misconception that if an electrical storm isn't directly overhead (that is, you aren't yet being rained upon), there exists no danger of being struck by a bolt. Truth is, lightning can and has hit people long before the rains ever came. Take the case of the aforementioned Colorado teen hit by a side flash which bounced off a nearby tree: the storm that generated the bolt which felled him was far off in the distance. As to how to avoid being struck by lightning:
Additional information:
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