Now the heat wave has come to an end we have a spell of thunderstorms and lightning. I was out walking and noticed that the "embankment" next to the path was nearly vertical ,some 30 feet high and covered with a thick metal lattice designed to prevent rocks and smaller stones falling down onto the people and the cars. My thought was that this looked like it might be a dangerous place to be in a thunderstorm and that the metal lattice (about 200 metres long and as mentioned perhaps 10 metres high) could attract lightning and so make its base a dangerous place to be . Was I right to be wary?
I do not think it was particularly dangerous, no. The places that are dangerous are where charges are concentrated and vertically proud of the landscape. That allows concentrations of ions to gather, which results in a strike. A huge net of metal like that will act to diffuse the charge over a wide area. Even if lightning struck there, it has innumerable paths to-ground that don't involve going through you.
Thanks,that reassures.(not that I like being out in a thunderstorm anyway) When ,I was young we lived on an army base abroad and I was told the story that a father and son had been struck by lightning and killed whilst out hunting with rifles. Many years later I rather suspect that they may have died as a result of attempting (or seeming to) to infiltrate or reconnoitre the base. This was Malta around 1959 and Malta gained independence a year or so later. Some 20 years later the foreman at the place I worked then told me he had been in the British SAS (or very similar) and his job was to go around breaking down the doors of the nationalists houses in Malta ,something I was completely unaware was going on at all till he told me.
