Zapped!

Every August, lightning flickers in New Mexico's monsoon-darkened skies, bringing forest fires, power outages — and death.

By David A. Fryxell

Driving home at dusk through the Gila National Forest, from Lordsburg to Silver City, the ever-vigilant sweep of highway shoulders for deer seeking to become hood ornaments is interrupted by a more compelling spectacle in the sky.

Lightning crinkles the clouds over the mountains ahead, splintering the gathering dark the way a crack disseminates across the ice in a pond. It's as though the sky has been split, allowing some supernal glow beyond to peek through, if only for an instant. Along the fringes of the lightning's fraying path, the air momentarily glows the electric pink of a neon sign.

Vegas has nothing on New Mexico when it comes to light shows, not in the summertime. Meteorologists and weather buffs can debate when and whether the annual "monsoon" season officially begins each summer, but July and August bring thunderstorms and lightning to western New Mexico, as dependably as flipping a calendar page. The mountains of northern New Mexico, according to scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who are in a position to know, receive the most lightning strikes of any area in the country outside of Florida, a state that attracts thunderstorms the way it does retirees and mouse-hatted tourists. Around Los Alamos, lightning season peaks in July — perhaps coincidentally, the month when Manhattan Project scientists based there decided to try their hand at unleashing their own manmade thunder, near Alamogordo. For New Mexico as a whole, according to the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque, the month with the greatest number of "lightning events" is August. Lightning is most likely to strike here about four in the afternoon. So if you find yourself outdoors in late afternoon this month and the hair starts to stand up on the back of your neck. . . well, we'll get to what to do — besides pray — in a moment.

From 1959 through 2003, according to the National Weather Service's "Storm Data" report, 88 New Mexicans found themselves in the lightning bull's-eye and did not survive the experience. That makes lightning — not flash floods, ranked second — the state's leading weather-related cause of death. Florida, predictably, led the nation with 425 lightning fatalities from 1959-2003. Like chile production, however, death by lightning is one of the rare statistics where New Mexico can rightly claim to be number-one — when figured per capita. Our relatively sparse population pops the Land of Enchantment right to the top, with 1.48 deaths by lightning per million people.

That barely beats out Wyoming, which nonetheless jumped to number-one in the briefer, more recent period of 1997 to 2006. Perhaps because of drought years with fewer thunderstorms — or maybe we're just learning to go indoors when it storms — New Mexico slid all the way to 21st in per-capita lightning fatalities over the past decade. Wyoming also edges us out in casualties — injuries plus deaths — from lightning strikes over the span from 1959 to 1993. The safest place during that time if you're worried about lightning was Alaska, which recorded zero casualties. The weather service doesn't calculate combined statistics for deaths by lightning plus deaths by blizzard.

Although historically, it seems, your odds of being a victim are higher here in New Mexico, nationwide about one in 600,000 Americans gets struck by lightning in any given year. Over an 80-year lifespan, you have roughly a one in 5,000 chance of being hit.

Not even the pious, it seems, are exempt from the risk of heaven-sent thunderbolts. Take the case of Hailu Kidane Marian, a religious bookseller from Puerto Rico who was going door-to-door in northwest Miami, Fla., just last month. According to news accounts, "he was struck down by a bolt of lightning which flew from a clear blue sky." A witness reported, "I heard a boom, and I looked and the guy jumped back, and he just laid there, stiff." Although Marian was not breathing and his heart had stopped, paramedics were able to resuscitate him before rushing him to a hospital, where he was in critical condition. "It's difficult what happened, you know, but what can we do?" a member of Marian's religious group told the press, adding, "Things happen in life, but we still believe in God."

The lightning struck on a Sunday.

Despite its tendency to strike the faithful and the heathen alike, lightning has long been associated with God or the gods. The Greeks and Romans believed that the thunderbolt — invented by Athena aka Minerva, goddess of wisdom — was the weapon of choice of the king of the gods, Zeus or Jupiter respectively. Temples were erected at the sites of lightning strikes, deemed sacred spots. The Vikings credited their thunder god, Thor, with producing lightning by striking his hammer against an anvil while driving his chariot through the clouds.

The association of the oak, or "thunder tree," with Thor explains why even today some window-shade cords have acorn-shaped knobs, according to Randy Cerveny, director of the climatology laboratory at Arizona State University and a "weather historian." In an article in ASU Research, Cerveny explained that the oak was sacred to Thor: "In many places, the oak was thought to insure safety from lightning. Many learned to their misfortune that this was a false belief." Even into medieval times, according to Cerveny, people kept oak branches — especially those from a tree that had already been lightning-struck — in their houses as a charm against "thunderbolts." Eventually, branches were replaced by more convenient acorns — a symbol that persisted on windows into recent times.

Other plants associated with the fork of lightning — mistletoe, ash, hazel, white-thorn — were credited with healing powers and repelling snakes. Comparative mythology expert John Fiske maintains, "The forked streak of lightning is the archetype of the divining rod in its oldest form."

In the Middle Ages, ASU's Cerveny adds, the faithful believed that ringing church bells could disperse lightning, and bell towers often carried the Latin inscription, "Fulgura frango" ("I break up lightning"). Alas, however, he cites a medieval scholar's report on "Proof that the ringing of bells during thunderstorms may be more dangerous than useful," which found that, over a 33-year span, 386 lightning strikes on church towers killed 103 bell ringers.

In the Middle East, Egyptians believed their god Seth-Typhon created lightning with an iron spear. The Persians viewed lightning as a manifestation of divine wrath. And, deeper into Asia, early sculptures of Buddha show him carrying a thunderbolt. Indra is the Hindu god of lightning and storms.

In Africa, Bantu tribes attributed lightning to a bird-god, Umpundulo.

In the New World, some Indian tribes also thought a celestial bird made the lightning with its flashing wings, while its flapping was heard as thunder. Navajo sand paintings show a lightning bolt as a wink in the eye of the Thunderbird. The Mayan god Chac, also known as Hopop Caan ("He Who Lights the Sky"), was depicted carrying a serpentine axe that represented lightning and thunder. Chac's lightning axe was said to have broken a great rock, from which he drew maize, the staple of Mayan life. This Mayan lightning god is the oldest continually worshipped deity in Mesoamerica, where some Christian farmers still fall back on praying to Chac in times of drought.

But it's not just primitive peoples and medieval villagers who've link the lightning bolt with power, speed and even divinity. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, lightning has the power to animate a creature cobbled together from corpses. In comic books, young Billy Batson becomes the superhero Captain Marvel, with a lightning bolt emblazed on his scarlet chest, by saying the magic word SHAZAM (an acronym for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury) and calling down magical lightning. Hitler's ruthlessly successful "blitzkrieg" literally meant "lightning war."

Then there's "white lightning," the moonshine whose Southern backwoods purveyors fled the "revenuers" in the souped-up cars that gave us NASCAR.

Even love has been likened to lightning. In French and Italian, the phrases for "love at first sight" — coup de foudre and colpo di fulmine — translate literally as "stroke of lightning."

Gaining an understanding of lightning beyond myth and magic would have to wait until that American polymath and patriot, Benjamin Franklin, took an interest. Earlier scientists had dabbled in electricity, as far back as 600 BC when the Greek philosopher Thales observed that rubbing a piece of amber with a cloth made it attract feathers and straw. Thales had discovered static electricity — and lightning is just static electricity writ large. But we didn't even have a word for the phenomenon until the late 1500s, when William Gilbert, court physician to Britain's Queen Elizabeth I, repeated Thales' experiments. Gilbert dubbed the mysterious force "electrica," from the Greek word for "amber."

Franklin observed a demonstration of "electrica" in 1746 by a Dr. Spence from Scotland. Intrigued, Franklin experimented with Leyden jars, which "store" static electricity, and pondered such questions as: How many jars would it take to kill a turkey? (Although Franklin would later promote the turkey as the national bird, he wasn't above sacrificing it to science.)

In 1752, Franklin performed the famous kite experiment that led him to conclude that lightning was a form of electricity just like that in his turkey-zapping Leyden jars. Or at least that's how the story goes. ASU's Cerveny thinks it's doubtful Franklin ever actually flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key attached; he points out that Franklin never wrote about performing such an experiment, though Franklin did propose the idea and some brave souls in France gave it a try. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, however, states flatly that Franklin did fly his famous kite in 1752.

"Franklin developed the single-fluid theory of electricity," the Institute's exhibit, "Franklin: He's Electric," goes on, "introducing many of the terms used to describe electricity today: battery, conductor, condenser, charge, discharge, uncharged, negative, minus, plus, electric shock and electrician. And because he understood both the power and danger of lightning, he invented the lightning rod to protect ships, buildings and even people against it."

The basic principle of Franklin's lightning rod, still used today, is not to repel lightning but rather to give it a harmless and highly conductive path to the earth. Instead of zapping a building, lightning is attracted to the rod, from which it follows a heavy wire to a grid buried in the ground, where it dissipates.

The same year Franklin invented the lightning rod — and a year after he may or may not have flown his famous kite — Swedish physicist G.W. Richmann proved that thunderclouds contain an electric charge. Unlike Franklin, however, Richmann did not survive his experiment.

More than a quarter-millennium after Franklin's insight, tools such as photography and spectroscopy allow far more sophisticated investigations into lightning than kites and keys. Much of what scientists know about lightning comes from just a handful of research facilities, including Langmuir Laboratory at New Mexico Tech in Socorro. Built in 1963 near the summit of 10,783-foot South Baldy Peak, the lab follows up on the pioneering 1930s research into thunderstorms over New Mexico by Professor E. J. Workman, later president of the school. But for all that modern technology has enabled us to learn about lightning, Richard Sonnenfeld, a scientist at the lab, confessed in a recent Albuquerque Tribune article, "We don't really know how it starts."

Oh, scientists understand that lightning is an electrical discharge within the clouds or between the clouds and the ground. But exactly how such powerful electric charges get built up in the first place remains a bit of a mystery.

The most popular theory seems to be that ice particles, which form in a thunderhead as it towers up six to 10 miles into cooler regions of the atmosphere, collide within a cloud. In these collisions and resultant fracturing, smaller particles tend to acquire a positive charge and larger particles become negatively charged. The positive particles rise, while the heavier, negative particles fall toward the bottom of the cloud. Since air, for all its apparent, well, nothingness, actually is a good electric insulator, a big charge — tens of thousands of volts per inch — can build up before resistance finally breaks down. Lightning is simply the discharge of electricity between the positive and negative parts of thunderclouds — just like the spark between your hand and a doorknob in the winter.

That is, if your hand and the doorknob — or Thales' amber and feathers — were able to generate 100 million volts of electric potential, some 30,000 amps of charge. Plus heat in the neighborhood of 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, triple the temperature on the surface of the sun. The total energy in a large thunderstorm, in fact, is more than in an atomic bomb.

Lightning heats the surrounding air to 18,000 degrees, causing it to rapidly expand. The expanding, superheated air compresses the air it pushes outward and creates a shockwave much like that in a bomb blast. We hear the explosion of the air as thunder. Although the flash of lightning — traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second — reaches our eyes effectively instantaneously, the accompanying boom of thunder trails behind, traveling at the relatively pokey pace of one-fifth of a mile in a second. That's why, if you count the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, then divide by five, you can estimate the distance to the lightning in miles. Thunder generally can't be heard more than 15 miles away.

Lightning and its concomitant thunder are happening all the time, around the globe. About 1,800 thunderstorms are typically active at any given moment — 16 million storms a year — lighting Earth's skies with 100 flashes every second.

About three-quarters of all lightning occurs within the clouds, including "sheet lightning" and "heat lightning" (which is ordinary lightning flashing too far away to hear the thunder). When lightning reaches out of the clouds and strikes the earth, it starts with a streamer about 50 yards long. In fractions of a second, these "stepped ladders" extend like tendrils toward the ground. The positively charged ground sends its own streamer to intercept the descending stepped ladder. When a connection is made along this one-to-two inch channel, like plugging a cord into an outlet, energy is released from cloud to ground. The lightning that we see actually represents a return stroke from the earth to the clouds, a flash traveling skyward at 60,000 miles per second.

Occasional oddball thunderbolts reverse this process, connecting a circuit between the ground and the positively charged top of a stormcloud. Carrying a high peak electrical current, such "positive lightning" can strike five to 10 miles away from the core of a rainstorm.

And, yes, lightning can strike twice in the same place. University of Arizona scientists calculated that a lightning flash represents strikes in an average of 1.45 different locations, meaning that many secondary and tertiary strikes are repeats.

Or there's Willie Tyler's famous explanation, "The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time."

When the hair starts standing up on your head or neck during a storm, that's your body's version of the ground sending streamers up to meet the "thunderbolts." But you don't have to feel electrified to be at risk — just being outside and hearing thunder is bad news. One Japanese study set out to determine the average interval between lightning strikes, to figure how long you have to seek shelter: "It is concluded," the researchers wrote, "that there exists no safe time interval during which a human is free from direct strikes."

If there's no time to reach the relative safety of a building or a car — and, no, you should NOT seek shelter under a tree, which is like trying to avoid a bull by waving a cape — you should assume "the lightning crouch." Originally, experts thought the safest position in a lightning storm was lying flat on the ground. But it turns out that lightning can create currents within the ground that can kill up to 100 feet from the site of a strike. So your best bet is to minimize both your height and your contact with the ground, curling into a ball while perching on the balls of your feet. Use your hands to cover your ears.

Rubber-soled shoes won't save you. The power in a lightning strike can burn through any insulator in everyday use, including the ceramic insulators on power lines. A half-inch of rubber is just a joke to a lightning bolt.

Nor will the rubber tires on a car keep you safe — but being inside a car will protect you. It's not the tires; the car acts like a "Faraday cage," named for British physicist Michael Faraday, directing the current around you and into the ground.

You are safest within a building, but lightning can get you even indoors. In fact, the largest death toll from a single lightning strike is 21, recorded in 1975 when a bolt hit a shed in Rhodesia and killed everyone inside. The US record stands at eight, killed in a 1961 strike on a North Carolina tobacco barn.

Talking on the phone while inside increases your risk of being struck. About four to five percent of lightning-strike victims are hit while chatting on the phone. According to NASA, "talking on the telephone" ranks fifth among the "most common dangerous activities associated with lightning strikes," after number-one, "work or play in open fields," and "boating, fishing and swimming," "working on heavy farm or road equipment" and "playing golf," but ahead of "repairing or using electrical appliances." But only corded phones risk conducting a strike through the line and into your body; cordless and cell phones are safe, experts say.

Michael Utley, however, has noted 13 cases since 2004 of people being zapped while talking on cell phones. A former Massachusetts stockbroker who was struck by lightning while golfing, Utley now tracks lightning victims and preaches thunderstorm safety on his www.struckbylightning.org Web site. Similarly, recent media reports have suggested that listening to an iPod is a risk factor in a thunderstorm. But Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Weather Service, says such cordless electronic devices can't actually lure the lightning. Carrying an iPod may create unusual burns if you get struck, but it doesn't increase your likelihood of being zapped in the first place.

Fans of the cable-TV show "Mythbusters," which confirmed the corded-phone "myth" with an explosive demonstration, may recall another lightning legend, which the program deemed "plausible": Don't take a shower or otherwise expose yourself to plumbing during a thunderstorm. The real danger here is probably older, metal plumbing, which could conduct electricity; modern PVC pipes present less of a hazard.

If someone is actually hit by lightning, the NASA "Lightning Primer" advises first checking breathing and pulse. Second, in all capital letters, it suggests, "TREAT APPARENTLY DEAD FIRST." Then perform mouth-to-mouth and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

The medical science of lightning's effect on the human body, called keraunopathy, is known to only a handful of specialists. According to one such expert in France, only 20 percent of victims are immediately struck dead. Treating the surviving 80 percent, however, is different from other electric-shock victims; lightning can deliver up to 15 times the contact voltage of, say, an industrial accident.

Besides the risk of cardiac arrest, lightning strikes typically cause burns on the head, neck and shoulders. Victims can also be injured by falling down or being thrown by the blast. Experts in keraunopathy report that 70 percent of survivors also suffer residual effects — which can develop much later — including neuropsychiatric, vision and hearing problems. Lightning victims can even suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, much like combat veterans.

Nationwide in the US, lightning causes an average of 93 deaths and 300 injuries each year. Based on statistics from 1980 through 1995, men are far more likely to die from lightning than women, representing 85 percent of the fatalities. Teens, ages 15 to 19, are the age group most at risk.

The deadliest states for lightning — not adjusting for population — from 1959 to 2003 were Florida, Texas and North Carolina. Looking at all lightning casualties from 1959 to 1994, Florida again leads the way, with more than twice the deaths plus injuries of second-place Michigan, after which come Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The Michigan numbers are deceiving, however, according to a "Storm Data" analysis, because of two "exceptional events": In August 1975, a whopping 90 people were injured in a single lightning strike on a campground at Leslie, Mich. And in June 1979, 45 National Guard troops suffered minor injuries when lightning zapped their camp near Grayling, Mich. Nationally, there are about 2.5 injuries for every death by lightning.

Across the country, the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) measures an average of 21.7 million lightning flashes annually. (If you care about such things, figuring that only about 70 percent of flashes are actually detected, that works out to one lightning casualty for every 86,000 flashes.) The NLDN maintains more than 100 remote, ground-based lightning sensors nationwide. It's headquartered in Tucson, where the University of Arizona's Institute of Atmospheric Physics is also a leader in lightning research.

Besides injuries to people, lightning causes an estimated $35 million a year in measurable property damage, though the real total is likely much higher. One expert pegs the true cost at more than $4 billion annually. In New Mexico, lightning is a leading cause of forest fires — one immune to the suasions of Smokey the Bear.

But lightning can be creative as well as destructive, at least according to a famous 1953 experiment. Two scientists at the University of Chicago, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, theorized that a chemical soup similar to that of primeval Earth could produce the basic building blocks of life — with a little assist from lightning. Miller simulated the planet's early atmosphere with "clouds" of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water, set above a roiling "ocean." Then he zapped this mixture with electricity, to reproduce the nearly constant lightning storms believed to rage above the early Earth. After a week of artificial lightning, Miller tested the contents of his closed system with a chromatograph.

He found that 10 to 15 percent of the carbon — originally present as part of methane — was now recombined into various organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in living things. As a Duke University chemistry primer puts it, "Miller's experiment showed that organic compounds such as amino acids, which are essential to cellular life, could be made easily under the conditions that scientists believed to be present on the early Earth."

Hopes that the Miller/Urey experiment might soon unlock the origins of life faded, however. Among other hurdles, scientists came to conclude that lightning storms were not as omnipresent on the primitive Earth as reflected in the experiment. Other researchers began to look at meteorites from outer space as the source of the building blocks of life on Earth.

Still, as lightning crackles over the monsoon-darkened mountains of New Mexico, it's not difficult to imagine that celestial spark as more than just the sky's version of touching a static-y doorknob. We may have retired the thunder god Thor — except for Thursdays ("Thor's day") — but in the back country of Central America they still pray to Chac, the lightning-wielder who brought forth maize. Who doesn't see the sky split open with whiteness, feel the recoil of thunder in your chest, and experience a supernatural shudder of awe mingled with fear? Bolts of fire hotter than the sun blink around our skies, unpredictably singeing saints and sinners alike here below. Lightning is powerful yet fickle — exactly the way people first envisioned their gods.

We can understand the science, yet lightning still looks like magic.

The atmospheric interchange of atomic charges imposes itself upon your retinas even with your eyes closed. The TV fritzes, lights flicker. Windows rattle. Dogs whine. Millions of volts perform their dance in the clouds as they have since the planet's dawning.

Go ahead, say it.

SHAZAM!

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure

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