THE BOTTOM LINE Lightning can travel through plumbing and shock people.
This of course begs the question “Can Lightning travel through your Pipes?”
An answer is that scary fact: Lightning can travel through your pipes and strike you while you’re showering. “The plumbing and other metal in our homes can serve as a conduit for electrical current,” Jeffrey A .
Plumbing This may come as a surprise to some of you since most of you out there probably do not know that lightning can actually damage your home’s plumbing system as well. It is actually a huge problem in some parts of the world, specifically ones prone to lightning, like Florida and Northern Australia.
Once in a structure, lightning can travel through the electrical, phone, plumbing, and radio/television reception systems. Lightning can also travel through any metal wires or bars in concrete walls or flooring. .
Can lightning go through ice?
By counting the lightning flashes, the study found that lightning and ice do in deed go together in a number of environments, including coastal areas and over land and sea. It revealed around 10 million kilograms of ice produced one lightning flash every minute.
Lightning current may enter a building and transfer through wires or plumbing and damage everything in its path. Similarly, in urban areas, it may strike a pole or tree and the current then travels to several nearby houses and other structures and enter them through wiring or plumbing.
The energy goes through the air. It goes to a place that has the opposite charge. This lightning bolt of energy that is let out is called a leader stroke. It can go from the cloud to the ground. Or, a leader stroke can go from the cloud to another cloud.
Also, what happens when lightning hits ice?
Ice is an even poorer electrical conductor than water. So, if lightning were to strike an icy surface of a lake, part of the bolt would spread out laterally from the strike point, forming transient Lichtenberg figure sparks along the surface of the ice, as it searched for a good path to ground.
This is a very pertinent question since according to NASA, lightning is caused when tiny ice crystals constantly bump against larger ice pellets many miles above the earth, in cumulonimbus clouds.
Can Lightning kill a diver?
Several divers have been killed by lightning in the past, most often as they surface in a thunderstorm. Why divers and not fish you may ask? Well, it appears that the diving tanks act as giant conductors and zap, bye bye.
Lightning doesn’t strike the ocean as much as land, but when it does, it spreads out over the water, which acts as a conductor. It can hit boats that are nearby, and electrocute fish that are near the surface. If you’re at the beach and hear thunder or see lightning, get out of the water.
Apparently not, unlike air, the sea is a very good conductor as it contains salt.
Any fish within a few meters of the strike area would probably be killed but beyond that they would probably just feel a tingle. Fish also tend to be a bit deeper in the water and not at the surface where the current is concentrated. So again, the odds are well stacked in favor of the fish.
Why doesn’t lightning strike the water?
According to the NASA Earth Observatory, this makes sense because of the way lightning forms. Solid earth absorbs sunlight and heats up faster than water does. That heat causes more convection and instability in the atmosphere, which in turn causes more lightning-producing storms to form. Even still, lightning does strike the water sometimes.
The Empire State Building is hit an average of 23 times a year Myth: If it’s not raining or there aren’t clouds overhead, you’re safe from lightning. Fact: Lightning often strikes more than three miles from the center of the thunderstorm, far outside the rain or thunderstorm cloud. “Bolts from the blue” can strike 10-15 miles from the thunderstorm.