Outdated lightning safety advice is making the rounds again, prompting experts to speak up about what actually keeps you safe in a storm.
If you get caught outdoors during a lightning storm, safety experts once recommended adopting a crouched position to lessen your chances of being struck by lightning. It turns out, however, that the position doesn’t make you any safer.
“If you’re caught outside during a thunderstorm, the best plan of action is to move as fast as you can to a safer place,” John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the NLSC, said in a statement released by Loehr Lightning Protection Co. “The sooner you get to a safe place, the lower your risk. Crouching only prolongs the risk of being struck,” explained Jensenius.
The crouch isn’t just outdated—it was debunked almost 20 years ago. But despite the fact that the NLSC and the National Weather Service stopped recommending the crouch in 2008, institutions such as the American Hiking Society and the city of Bellmead in Texas continue to include it in their lightning safety guidelines.
Keeping your feet close together makes zero difference, as what matters is the actual contact surface between you and the ground and not the area defined between your feet. Ideally you should reduce that to zero, but humans are not generally known for their ability ro hover in midair.
The most common cause of deaths from lightning is from ground current, where lightning travels through the ground, goes up one leg, and back down the other leg back into the ground. My understanding on it is that different parts of the ground have different conductivity, and if your feet are on patches of ground with different charge levels the lightning can go through your legs as the most conductive path between the two points. For similar reasons, I was once told that the safest way to move across the ground near a downed power pole (if you absolutely had to for some reason) was either to shuffle your feet while keeping them as close together as possible, or to hop on one foot.
That actually makes sense. I wouldn’t hop on one foot, though. That increases the odds of falling flat.