A reasonable fear of lightning

People who know me well know that I am, to say the least, a touch on the sensitive side when it comes to storms and the danger of lightning. A brother says I am completely unreasonable about this; I argue that it is completely justified, and based on my broader than average reading of the strange ways lightning has killed or injured people.

For example, I know that is not a good idea to be near open windows during lightning storms. Yet people complain when I immediately start shutting windows as soon as I judge the storm is close enough. (Sometimes I can justify it because of the rain, but often I am shutting them before it starts.) The fact is that lightning has been known to come inside houses via open windows. For example, in New South Wales today, lightning through open windows struck not once but twice:

The Ambulance Service of NSW said a 37-year-old man was hit by lightning while doing the washing up near a window at a YMCA camp in Yarramundi at about 7.30pm (AEDT) on Thursday.

Paramedics were treating the man, who was suffering neck and shoulder pain, and planned to take him to hospital.

Emergency services were also called to a house on Macquarie Road, in Springwood, in the NSW Blue Mountains, after it was struck by lightning at about 5pm.

"It's come through the window, it hit the curtains and ignited them," a firefighter at the scene told media at the scene.

Two people, including a man suffering smoke inhalation, were taken to Blue Mountains Hospital.

Basically, I know from first hand experience, (there are two separate stories I can tell) that otherwise intelligent people are, as a rule, still pretty much completely ignorant of, or too silly to take reasonable precautions against, the danger of lightning, even when they are in situations where the danger is absolutely as high as it could possibly be. (Well, short of doing a Benjamin Franklin and flying a kite up into it.)

But as I say, those stories are for another day.