protection from lightning

Usually
I’ll just paddle close to the shore and stay in my canoe in your lake scenario (or a river) with nothing else around. Whatever is on the shore, trees or no trees, there’s nothing you can do about it. Of course, I wouldn’t park under an isolated tree.



I feel the odds are that the lightning is more likely to strike the land around the lake or river than the water surface. Hence, I prefer to stay in the boat right near the shore rather than get out and sit on the land. Of course, if it’s a real downpour and my open canoe starts to fill up, I’ll eventually get out to dump it.

My position is to adopt what they say to
the situation you are in. What they say is the straight facts. What you do about that is your decision. It is important to know that certain strategies do not reduce your risk or do so minimally. Why are you opposed to knowing what things work and what things don’t?

Straight facts? It’s shot through with
unexamined generalizations, and is unreferenced to any other scale of risk. How is one supposed to know what to do, when one has no way of judging the level of risk? NOAA wants everyone to cower indoors for half an hour after they last hear thunder. Is there any comparable level of customary cowering?



I want them to admit that the actual level of risk is low, compared to other, everyday risks. Then we can decide what to do about their recommendations.

Electrically conductive materials
I remember reading a study somewhere (I’ll try to locate it) stating that the material of the pole (or paddle) attracting the lightning is not that essential.



I paddle with a carbon paddle but I do not think switching to a wooden paddle during a thunder storm would make that much difference.



Lightning might strike a plastic paddle as well as a carbon paddle. The current will travel on the surface of the shaft and the shaft is most likely to be wet due to rain and salt water exposure making it conductive. If the electrical resistance in the paddle turns out to be too big then the lightning will simply take a different path (i.e. your hands holding the paddle).

You need to normalize your observations
The reason there are more apparent drownings that lightning strike deaths is that there is ALWAYS water present when paddling but lightning is present only occasionally. And there are fewer paddlers out and about on days when lightning is present.


If NOAA wasn’t hyper conservative in its
If NOAA wasn’t hyper conservative in its recommendations they’d get sued every time somebody got struck.



You want them to admit that the risk is low as if they are being deliberately deceptive. To what end would they perpetrate such a deception?

I tend to agree with you…
About getting out. I’ve seen lightning bounce on the water. It can actually skim on the surface and that’s scary. I once paddled in with lightning cracking right over us. You just start praying. Supposedly that squat position is supposed to be best once you’re out of the boat. I’m very cautious about dark clouds in the summer and don’t take chances. I can understand why some may feel more secure sitting in their kayak next to shore with no trees than getting out. Tough call.

Good read about lightning
The excellent outdoor/nature writer, Gretel Erlich, was struck by lightning while working a ranch. She wrote a pretty interesting book about recovering from the big zap. Here’s a link to a review



http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/match.shtml

They are not being deceptive, They
are so focused on one problem area that they have lost perspective.



To ask people to stay indoors for half an hour after the last time they hear thunder shows tremendous lack of perspective. To ask people to forgo outdoor recreation when the thunderstorm probability rises above 30% shows that NOAA does not understand the difference between physical life and real life.



Your statement about NOAA being sued is based on legal ignorance. They are in no such danger.



All I want is for NOAA to tell the facts, and the truth about the risk of being harmed by lightning. All of us are in more danger from auto accidents, from risk of drowning, and probably from risk of fire, certain diseases, and from depression and boredom waiting indoors, measuring the amount of time since the last thunder.

Why look at it that way? The only
relevant comparison is whether in any given year of paddling, I stand more chance of being killed by lightning, drowned in a paddling accident, or killed in an auto accident.



That’s how you compare risk. You don’t “normalise” based on time of exposure.



Even saying that, I think NOAA way overstates the risk of being killed by lightning while paddling or hiking. We’ve had about five times as many deaths in my area from trees landing on cars during storms as we have from lightning. And then there’s those poor souls who drowned in a ditch after getting out of their cars to take shelter from a tornado.

I understand the limited liability
I understand the extremely limited liability of government forecasters under sovereign immunity. That doesn’t stop people from bringing suits or complaining to their congressman that “something has to be done”. NWS, USGS Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, etc… get sued all the time over thunderstorms, hurricanes, inaccurate river forecasts, rip current drownings,… The vast majority of suits are thrown out under FTCA protection but a few are successful. Inaccuracy in forecasting is immune from negligence or liability claims for the most part. Giving the all clear when data still indicates “some” level of risk has resulted in a couple of successful lawsuits.

An irrational public gets you unreasonable safety recommendations from an agency concerned with public safety. This is the reason that a rotating thunderstorm that might produce an EF0 at most generates the same automatic “run for the hills” canned tornado warning as an obvious supercell with a hook echo and likely tornado on the ground.



As far as the relative risk of lightening. If I never modified my activity around storms, living where I live, the risk of death or severe injury by lightening probably would become comparable to other more common causes of death or severe injury, not up there with driving a car but not insignificant either. When we are having one of our typical summer storms with lots of lightening I’d be foolish to go out and do scheduled intervals on the lake in my carbon fibre boat with my carbon fiber paddle. Likewise, if I followed the 30 minutes rule or the “if you can hear thunder rule” I’d never go outside during the wet season. But I don’t consider completely dismissing the risk entirely as too remote to worry about to be a reasonable action in an area with the strike density that we have.

why not?
"""“That’s how you compare risk. You don’t “normalise” based on time of exposure.”"""



Why not? I paddle about 12hrs a week. If I always did scheduled training irrespective of the weather my time of exposure to lightening would be quite high (we get a lot of lightening in central Florida especially since I live where the seabreeze collision happens most often) and the risk of dieing due to strike relative to all the other things in life would increase. Time of exposure matters. Back when I lived in the Shenandoah valley I could be outside everyday all day and be exposed to less lightening than I am down here just walking to and from my car.



http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_info/lightningmaps/US_FD_Lightning.pdf



Down here, lightening is much more likely to kill you than wind (at least with our summer storms, winter thunderstorms that are associated with frontal systems and mid-latitude cyclones are a different beast).



http://www.uic.edu/labs/lightninginjury/holle30yrs.htm



The numbers of weather deaths in general are vanishingly small compared to car accidents but there aren’t that many people knocking about in severe weather while just about everybody is hurtling down the road everyday.

Sorry incorrect info
as the 45 degree cone is a myth



http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/cone-of-protection-myth.html



Trees are no help either if you happen to be in contact with roots.

That’s good. I wouldn’t worry too much
about carbon fiber. I don’t recall any special concern about aluminum canoes or aluminum shaft paddles, versus FG or wood-canvas, back when aluminum hulls predominated. I have a custom Double Torque aluminum bent shaft kayak paddle with carbon blades, and I wouldn’t worry any more about using it in a thunderstorm than I would when using a wood kayak paddle. The liklihood of being struck is the same. There would be a difference in current from a nearby strike climbing into the paddle, but I’m waiting for some real data on conductivity of carbon blades and shafts.

sounds like good advice
prayer wouldn’t hurt either (lol) after all it is a lightning strike we are talking about.

If you drive to the water before you
paddle, your risk of death by car is greater that day than your risk of death by lightning.



And your method of comparison is NOT the way risk of death is set up. I say this as one who has had to wade through many, many studies of risk of death by suicide. The risk is stated as the number of deaths per year per 100.000.



Even in Florida, NOAA exaggerates the risk of death by lightning. It doesn’t really matter how risk is calculated. NOAA makes it seem as if the risk of death by lightning is quite high, and it isn’t.

odds of being struck
The discussion seems to have taken an odd turn. The odds of getting struck by lightning overall are pretty low. These general odds don’t apply if your outdoors in a lightning storm, since the general odds include everyone and not just people in lightning storms.



After watching a bolt hit about 50yds away as I was standing on the side of a river last year I reviewed that NOAA site. My recollection is that there was no proven method of significant improving your odds of not getting hit apart from getting indoors. I would portage an aluminum canoe during a lightning storm but I’m not confident that I know of any course of action to lessen the odds of getting hit.

Shouldn’t this be on B&B?

What you say is true. But are the odds
of getting struck in a thunderstorm, even if you are portaging in the middle of one, high enough to make you cancel outdoor plans? Because that seems to be what NOAA wants us to do, whenever there is a chance of thundershowers.



I was inside my house, safe in bed, when lightning struck a tree in the yard outside. It was the 1950s, when we were trained to duck and cover in a nuclear attack. So, I hit the floor before I smelled the ozone. But if I had been wandering around outside in the storm, would my odds of being struck have been much higher? Or would I have died of a respiratory disease?



Just to re-emphasize the irrational focus NOAA has on lightning, note their advice that SCUBA divers dive deep in the water until lightning is over. NOAA does not even mention the possibility that the total situation should be assessed before deciding what the divers and support boat should do.

marinas more dangerous than storms
Personally, I am more concerned about electrocution hazards around docks and marinas than I am about lightning.



http://www.todaysthv.com/news/PDF/electric_shock_drowning_incidents.pdf



Being a career electrician and electrical inspector, I cringe at the wiring installations and jerry rigging I see around shoreline structures and powered boats and am very leery of metal docks, particularly in fresh water. There has been suspicion that more drowning deaths occur due to electrical faults around these facilities than are officially accounted for. This is because it is difficult to substantiate that a drowning only occurred because the victim was immobilized by stray currents.