Lightning protection?

After some quick research I learned something today .... right you folks are:

The rubber tires are not what keep people in a metal skinned vehicle relatively (but not completely) safe from lightening. The vehicle's metal skin is merely acting as an ad hoc Faraday cage that may divert the bolt's energy around them instead of through them. However, there are conditions that govern how good this protection may or may not be for the people inside a vehicle.

When inside an RV with the power cable unplugged from the pedestal, and with some metal framing in the roof and walls, and with a metal floor under the floor insulation - I have no idea how well protected one would be.

Wizard, that stuff is scarey. Our barn is no further than 40 yards from the house. Lightning struck either the barn or close to it. it fried some stuff in the house and blew the telephone box apart on the outside barn wall.

The boom was horrendous also. Next morning the poor ole barn cat was deaf and has never recovered. Sad case as it really handicaps poor ole midnight.

ScottG wrote:

fj12ryder wrote:
The rubber tires on a car are not going to insulate you from a lightning strike, they are way too thin to resist the voltage of a lightning bolt.

True enough.. If lightening can jump for miles through the sky, a few inches of rubber sure isn't going to slow it down!

No doubt! Faraday Cage
This is why motorcycles and convertibles are prone to getting hit with injuries and death, while people in hard tops are usually OK, buildings are better, however watch out being around windows...
Just check the lightning stats.
Ken, living in the lightning capital of North America...

A few years ago I watched from inside my house as the neighbor's tree--a 60 foot tall hickory about 100 feet away--took a direct hit. The main trunk was split, and smoking chunks of bark were blown into my driveway. No electronics in either of our houses were damaged, but the tree had to go...

Regarding "insulating" value of tires.... they're NOT rubber... they are black, since they contain carbon, and oils, good conductors, and are filled with metal wires (steel belts). Minimal insulating value! Lightning is a STATIC charge - meaning it moves along the surface of objects, unlike AC current, which passes THRU things (like people...). Not going to isolate an RV from the ground...

I gag when I read an apocalyptic EMP novel. I was working on my PhD thesis of laser holography. Projecting an electromagnetic field. Back when Oog dragged Ooga off by the hair (1971).

May I present to you a raw and crude model or example for your analysis?

Inside an alternator the rotating part called a (rotor) projects a variable frequency field. Variable by polarity and variable by frequency. Both types of frequencies

Analog
PWM pulse width modulation

Modern alternator voltage regulators utilize transistors. Field Effect, MOSFET and earlier designs. It gets worse. Many voltage regulators directly source the vehicle engine management control unit the ECU.

And this sensitive pressure point is mounted in a plastic shell a scant inch distant from electromagnetic pulses that are perhaps as much as 1.6x10 as intense as the characteristic model of an EMP detonation or even coronal mass ejection even of the sun.

How is this possible?

It is because these circuits (meaning automobiles) lack an inductive pickup area that can accumulate enough EMF to saturate an electronic circuit to the point of destruction or damage. An antenna is needed and it has to be of extraordinary db gain.

Fantasy

The metal shell of an automobile is an extremely effective faraday cage.

The detonation of an EMP producing high altitude H-Bomb in the Pacific Ocean gained much attention when street lamps in the Hawaiian Island reportedly failed. The press went hog wild. Yet later analysis of maintenance records showed without a doubt there had been periods where even MORE streetlamps had failed over a 24 hour period.

Let's go back to those pulp EMP novellas. In many cases the only surviving method of communications was amateur radio operators and their tall antennas feeding high gain amplifiers. Fascinating.

The only commonly found circuits vulnerable to EMP induction have high gain antennas. Like HAM radios, hundreds of thousands of miles of distribution and transmission electrical networks with transformers. Yet a bolt of lightning can strike a network and devices like reclosers protect your home (neighborhood networks do not have reclosers nor do they have enough gain to induct critical levels of electromagnetic force from a pulse.

A magnetic resonance imaging machine develops thousands of times more electromagnetic force than a so-called back to the stone age mass coronal ejection. For a trick I hid a plastic case Velcro strap watch in a waste can, my second MRI. The same class of General Electric MRI machine that killed a janitor in Brazil this month when he entered a room with an energized MRI. It pulled on a steel case of a 10 lb fire extinguisher dragged him 15 feet across the floor and slammed against the magnetic coil housing. When the contents of the extinguisher evacuated he was suffocated.

When I was ejected out of the machine, before I was seated in a wheel chair, I fetched my still running digital watch. The nurse gave me a dose of aggravated RN which lasted all the way to my novel.

There are two main intertie grids in the USA, the Quebec and the Western. The western has seen numerous upgrades the Eastern grid is anyone's guess.

CME or thermonuclear detonation grid damage? Yes. Back to the stone age....hardly. Freeways clogged with dead automobiles....in your dreams....there would be some failures due to Bluetooth type integration. Amateur Radios broadcasting in the vacuum? I have to quit...my ribs ache. Where the hell is my Nook...they were just entering a dead city when a gang of motorcycle anarchists...

WOW :?

Sooo ... is the bottom line on lightening with an RV this: If any metal wall framing or metal skin on the RV is not grounded because the RV is unhooked from a power pedestal, and if the RV doesn't have a metal leveling jack (which connects to it's metal frame) directly resting on the ground - then lightening is not necessarily attrached to the RV if it's not parked so it's the highest point around? :h

I am under the impression the USA has turned into a carnival of disinformation, self-promotion, and hucksterism worth of a 150 year old traveling gypsy circus.

Name a newspaper whose course is not steered by sensationalism, alarmist skullduggery and divisive commentary. Not free speech not information to better the reader........pure unmitigated yellow journalism.

I'm going to wrap up my participation with an accusation...

I was inundated with years and pounds of newsprint articles bordering on hysteria about

The Antarctic Ozone Hole

The Year 2000 embedded chip catastrophe

The hole is fixed and I woke up to 2000 and could find scant news about the great societal meltdown - NOT

Become a skeptic when you sense you're being caught up in a wave of public fad. The climate fraud serves one master -- those who benefit from pandering fear. The climate is changing and NOTHING and I mean ZERO is being done to compensate for less water, hotter, colder, more intense storms. It's all about feeble efforts to somehow avoid an inevitable changing earth. Efforts that are PROFIT ORIENTED. Effort must be made yes. But with an eye on compensating for inevitable changes.

THIS is why the thought of joining some "corporate team" repelled me fifty years ago.

Read and investigate. When someone makes an outrageous statement of any kind anywhere ask yourself: What motive can they possibly have? Politics and the news media are panderers of self aggrandizement. Promoters of fads have an agenda. Find out what it is. We need public doubters and doubting in this society that must be protected against bullying. If the doubters are frauds -- let their uncovering be their fate.

The End