During a thunderstorm or a lightning storm, a lot of people like to go out and photograph or record the beauty that is mother nature. However, those same people usually don’t expect for the storm to affect them personally. Neither did 38-year-old Daniel Modøl, who walked outside on his terrace in Gjerstad, Aust-Agder, Norway to record the storm himself.
Modøl went to record the distant storm, capturing the lightning bolts that seemed to be pretty distant. That changed in a heartbeat when a lightning bolt struck his backyard, leaving a deafening crackling sound and a crater only 20 feet away from him! While he wasn’t able to capture the strike itself, he was able to document the horrendous damage that it left to his yard.
The pictures above show the damage done by the single lightning strike, projecting brush and rocks up onto his back porch.
This is taken from the spot that Modøl was filming, only seconds after the lightning strike. You can see the smoke and some burning shrubbery in the background. You can also see how wide the blast radius was!
Lightning typically strikes tall objects – trees, buildings, even mountains – but that’s not an unbreakable rule. Lightening can and does strike the ground and in fact, what you’re actually seeing is a flare from the ground up!
A cloud-to-ground strike sends a stream of negative electricity out, toward the ground; most objects on the ground have a positive charge, attracting the negative energy coming down from the sky. The two charges actually reach out to each other and when they meet, the flash of lightning we see is sent from the ground, up into the sky.
Of course, a lightning strike happens fast, so all we see is the flash of light!
After documenting the damage, Modøl decided it was probably safer to stay inside for the rest of the storm. Unfortunately, he found damage there too. The lightning had fried the outlet next to his modem and it was covered with burn marks as well.
Granted, it could have been so much worse. Although the odds of getting struck by lightning are about 1 in 12,000, there are approximately 500 people per year experience it firsthand. And even though 90 percent survive, it’s not the lightning strike itself that’s so scary. According to ScienceAlert.com, it’s what happens after.
It takes approximately three milliseconds for the lightning to move through your body. As it exits, you’ll likely have serious burns (third degree!) and deep wounds. Your clothes may also disintegrate – a result of the air around you being heated to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit which, by the way, is five times hotter than the surface of the sun!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! You’re also at risk of cardiac arrest, cell disruption, long-term mood and personality changes and something called a Lichtenberg figure, which is this crazy tree-branch design etched into your skin, the result of the path the lightning took as it traveled through your body.
So, given that Modøl could’ve been struck himself, I think we’d all agree that he got off easy.
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