A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  Another common physical symptom, one that appears to last a lifetime, is chronic paresthesias, a sensation of tingling, pricking, or numbness of the skin, similar to the feeling of “pins and needles” or of a limb “falling asleep.”

  Although a lightning flash generally does not stick around long enough to cause tissue breakdown in the classic burn sense, lightning goes into one place on a body and comes out another, so victims do bear permanent entry and exit wounds. Aside from these burn imprints, there are often few other external signs of a lightning strike. Sometimes a lightning victim can look almost unscathed, and medical personnel cannot properly evaluate the severity of injury until they have removed all of the patient’s clothing.

  More disturbing than the permanent marks that lightning brands on its survivors are the neurological symptoms it inflicts on them. Certainly, the psychological ramifications present the biggest challenge recovery-wise. Victims often describe mysterious, long-lasting symptoms that develop afterward with no clear explanation. The most frequent consequences are memory loss (short-term and long-term) and attention-deficit problems, although issues with aggression—even uncontrolled rage—and dramatically altered personalities have also been reported. Other inexplicable and debilitating symptoms—including sleep apnea, chronically interrupted sleep cycles, irritability, numbness, dizziness, stiffness in joints, fatigue, weakness, muscle spasms, depression, and an inability to sit still for long periods of time—only add to the mystique of the phenomenon.

  Inspiring fear and fascination for thousands of years, in early times, lightning was magic fire from the sky, heavily involved in superstitions, folklore, and early religions. A lightning bolt has been a powerful symbol throughout history and is the focus of many mythologies, often as a divine manifestation or as the weapon of a sky god or a storm god. The gods who possess it in ancient stories are the ones quick to rage, and as a means of dramatic instantaneous retributive destruction, lightning is unrivaled.

  Lightning is Herman Melville’s “God’s burning finger,” the phenomenon feared by Romans as the wrath of God. In Greek mythology, the Cyclops gave Zeus, king of the gods and the god of sky and weather, the weapon of lightning. Zeus is often depicted brandishing a thunderbolt over his head like a javelin. The Greeks regarded any spot struck by lightning as sacred, often erecting temples at those sites to worship the gods and attempt to appease them.

  Similarly, in Hindu mythology, Indra is the god of lightning, and he also used it as his weapon of choice. In Scandinavian mythology, Thor, the thunderer, was the foe of all demons and tossed lightning bolts at his enemies.

  In the 21st century, a somewhat more scientific understanding of lightning has evolved, although there continues to remain a blend of natural and supernatural, science and superstition, meteorological science and random coincidence. Lightning-strike survivors often seem less interested in the medical science behind their injuries than in existential questions about life and death, destiny, and divine retribution. Despite leaps in information, many modern storm chasers admit that they still find lightning the most baffling and frightening form of severe weather.

  The often hazardous field of lightning research, known as fulminology, has been in existence for more than 250 years. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin allegedly concocted two experiments to prove that lightning was naturally occurring electricity. As the story—or myth—goes, Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm in 1752, drawing sparks to his hand from a key tied to the kite string. At the first sign of the key receiving an electrical charge from the air, Franklin proved his theory. The other test, involving a lightning rod and a bell tower, resulted in the electrocution of a German scientist in St. Petersburg the following year.

  After these experiments, there was little improvement in the theoretical understanding of how lightning was generated for close to 150 years. The impetus for new research came from the field of engineering; as telephone poles and power-transmission lines became widely used, engineers needed to learn more about lightning to protect lines and equipment.

  In the 1890s, Nikola Tesla generated artificial lightning by using a large Tesla coil, enabling generations of future scientists to experiment with voltages enormous enough to create lightning. In the 1930s, Basil Schonland made significant contributions to the study of atmospheric electricity in the South African high veld, capturing lightning with fast-film photography and proving that each flash of lightning is actually a complex series of events.

  Beginning in the 1960s, the study of lightning took on a new urgency, particularly in the United States. On December 8, 1963, Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707 flying from Baltimore to Philadelphia, was in a holding pattern because of high winds when a lightning strike ignited fuel vapors in the left reserve tank. The wing blew apart, and the plane crashed, killing all 81 people onboard.

  Eight years later, on Christmas Eve, 1971, LANSA Flight 508 crashed in a thunderstorm en route from Lima to Pucallpa, Peru, killing all of its six crew members and 85 of its 86 passengers. Lightning had ignited one of the fuel tanks on this aircraft, too, causing it to explode in midair. As the plane disintegrated, a 17-year-old German girl plummeted into the Amazon rain forest two miles below, still strapped to her seat. Despite sustaining a broken collar bone and a concussion, she was able to trek through the dense Amazon jungle for 10 days until she was rescued by local lumbermen.

  More significant in terms of funding for lightning research, between the dates of those two doomed plane flights, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during takeoff on its way to the moon. On November 14, 1969, the spacecraft was hit first at 36.5 seconds into its flight by cloud-to-ground lightning, then again 52 seconds in by intracloud lightning. The strike caused the fuel cells in the service module to falsely detect overloads and knocked all three of them offline. The loss of all three fuel cells put Apollo 12 entirely on batteries, and the power-supply problem lit nearly every warning light on the control panel and caused much of the instrumentation to malfunction.

  The astronauts were able to execute a fairly obscure switch to a backup power supply and ultimately saved the mission. The launch continued successfully, becoming the second manned flight in the Apollo program to land on the moon. In a lengthy NASA report entitled “Analysis of Apollo 12 Lightning Incident,” scientists concluded that “atmospheric electrical hazards must be considered in greater depth for future Apollo flights.”

  The result was a wave of research, much of it funded by NASA, in which scientists ascertained many of lightning’s physical characteristics: speed, temperature, and current. In various tests, lightning was triggered in an effort to increase the safety of aircraft parts, runways, houses, and power lines. Lightning strikes were observed and recorded by various detection systems around the world.

  As a result of all of this monitoring, it is known that a flash usually measures anywhere from several hundred yards in mountainous areas where clouds are low to about four miles long in flat terrain where clouds are higher. The most common length is about a mile. The longest bolts start at the front of a squall line and travel horizontally back into the clouds. The longest recorded streak of lightning stretched 118 miles over Dallas, Texas. The stroke channel is only about half an inch in diameter, but it is surrounded by a glowing sheath that can be 10 to 20 feet wide.

  A bolt of lightning travels at about 224,000 mph, or 3,700 miles per second, but the visible light from the lightning moves at the speed of light, which is roughly 670 million mph, or 186,000 miles per second. Lightning can burn at up to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about six times hotter than the surface of the sun. Within a few milliseconds, that temperature decreases significantly, dropping to the heat of a normal high-voltage electric arc.

  Technically, lightning is an electrostatic discharge accompanied by the emission of visible light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. In short, it is an atmospheric discharge of electricity; lightning storms are also commonly referred to as electrical storms. Lightning is ca
used by the buildup of electric charge in storms—when the charges become too great, the air breaks down and conducts electricity between them.

  Lightning strikes both from the sky down to the ground and from the ground up, although the majority of lightning flashes (about five to 10 times as many) actually occur from cloud to cloud. In a typical cloud-to-ground flash, a channel of negative electricity, invisible to the naked eye, descends from the sky. In less time than it takes to blink, this path, known as a stepped leader, zigzags down in several rapid steps or spurts. As it snakes down to the ground, this stepped leader may branch into several paths in a forked pattern. This phase involves a relatively small electric current.

  Objects on the ground generally have a positive charge, and opposites attract. As the negatively charged stepped leader nears the ground, a channel of positive charge, called a streamer, reaches up from the object about to be struck (usually something tall, such as a tree, a house, or a telephone pole). When these two paths connect, a much more powerful electrical current, the return stroke, is released, and it zips back up into the sky in about one-millionth of a second.

  While lightning is generally perceived as traveling from the clouds to the earth, the vast majority of energy is actually dissipated in the opposite direction with the tremendous speed of the return stroke. The return stroke is the visible, luminous part of the lightning discharge. Each lightning flash contains anywhere from one to 20 return strokes. When the process rapidly repeats itself several times along the same path, the lightning looks as if it is flickering.

  During the return stroke, the expansion of the heated air compressed by the surrounding air produces a supersonic shock wave that decays to an ordinary sound wave. This is heard as thunder. It is not possible to have lightning without thunder, although the thunder is often too far away to be heard.

  A spate of lightning research in the last 10 years has led scientists to determine that lightning emits radiation, despite having no obvious physical means to do so, and is also capable of blasting huge quantities of gamma rays, more often associated with collapsing stars.

  Despite the recent focus on the science behind lightning, it seems to remains nature’s most confounding, and perhaps feared, phenomenon. Not only are atmospheric scientists unclear about exactly how lightning is initiated, but they also do not understand precisely why it is able to promulgate over great distances or even where it will strike.

  Recently, the U.S. government has renewed its interest in understanding, if not controlling, the underlying properties of lightning. In 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research-and-development arm of the Pentagon, has embarked on a project called NIMBUS. In an agency announcement, DARPA stated that “fundamental questions remain unanswered,” and “The mechanism of lightning initiation inside thunderstorms is one of the major unsolved mysteries in the atmospheric sciences.”

  The stated goal of the NIMBUS project is the protection of people and assets, specifically the “more than $1 billion a year in direct damages to property in addition to the loss of lives, disruption of activities (for example, postponement of satellite launches) and their corresponding costs.” The initiative hopes to ascertain “optimal strategies to reduce the probability of lightning strikes in a given area in the presence of a thunderstorm” and includes plans to direct where lightning strikes, in part by attempting to trigger flashes using rockets.

  Skeptics claim that the project may, in fact, be an attempt by the government to tame lightning for use, as in Greek mythology, as a weapon of war. NIMBUS is certainly not the U.S. government’s first foray into lightning research. In the mid-1960s and again in 1993, the military explored the concept of weaponizing ball lightning (an enigmatic phenomenon associated with lightning that manifests as luminous, energetic spheres during storms), but the projects, including one called Magnetically Accelerated Ring to Achieve Ultrahigh Directed Energy and Radiation, or MARAUDER, have been classified.

  In the past, the U.S. Defense Department has also funded the possibility of creating a “lightning gun,” a weapon that shoots bolts of electricity. As recently as 2009, the U.S. Army signed a multi-million-dollar contract with an Arizona company called Applied Energetics (formerly Ionatron) to develop a lightning weapon that uses ultrashort laser pulses to channel electrostatic discharges. The technology in question involves using a laser beam to create a plasma tunnel through the atmosphere to allow a powerful electric spark discharge—an artificial lightning bolt—to be directed onto a target with, ideally, some level of precision.

  One area in which scientists do seem to have gained more knowledge relates to the weather patterns within which lightning is likely to occur. It is generally agreed that the primary ingredient for natural lightning formation is a significant amount of moisture in the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere. The other necessary element is a mechanism to lift the moisture. Thunderstorm clouds, known as cumulonimbus clouds, are formed wherever there is enough upward motion, turbulence, and moisture to reach a temperature below freezing. These conditions most often intersect in the summer. The highest frequency of cloud-to-ground lighting in the United States and the greatest number of lightning deaths occur in Florida, especially along Lightning Alley, between Tampa Bay and Titusville, where a large moisture content in the atmosphere meets high surface temperatures and strong sea breezes.

  The western mountains of the United States, however, also produce strong upward motions that contribute to frequent cloud-to-ground lightning. Along the mountain slopes in the Tetons during the summer months, especially late July and August, updrafts are produced almost daily. These wind currents are strongest in the afternoon, when the ground surface temperatures are the highest and the warm air rises, causing vertical instability among the charges in the clouds. The majority of lightning storms in the Teton range occur between 3 P.M. and 6 P.M.

  These storms don’t last long, especially in terms of precipitation. Sometimes the rain falls on and off, but a more typical pattern within what is known as the monsoon flow is a 15-minute bout of heavy, sometimes even violent, rain. It is extremely common for lightning to illuminate the afternoon sky in the Teton range, and as Leo Larson says, “The Grand is not a place you want to be in a lightning storm.” (All of the Jenny Lake rangers seem to share the gifts of understatement and deadpan delivery.) Leo still vividly recalls an intense electrical storm on an icy east route of the Grand in the ’80s. He and a couple of other rangers had to hunker down as best they could, then get up and over the route as fast as they could to get away from the lightning. The terrifying feeling of loss of control over the elements in a life-threatening situation has never left him.

  Often, the weather can be seen coming, building up in the distance over Idaho as it streams in. Other times, day thundershowers can come on from the west without warning, so fast that climbers can’t see them until they are virtually on top of them.

  The morning of July 26, 2003, dawned cool, with temperatures in the high 40s. The weather forecasts and observations indicated that thunderstorms were likely to develop that afternoon. The Teton Interagency Dispatch Center issued a morning report stating that sunrise was at 6:05 A.M. and sunset would be at 8:53 P.M. In the weather section, the report predicted, “Partly cloudy with scattered showers and thunderstorms. Highs 65 to 75. Chance of rain 40%.”

  The heat built as the day progressed on July 26. By late morning, it was 73 degrees at low elevations, and warm air was rising. There were still blue skies at noon, but thunderstorms had moved in over the Tetons during the previous two afternoons.

  Lightning fatalities in the United States are less rare than in the past—likely because of the increasing number of golfers, boaters, hikers, and climbers—but still, the probability of someone being struck by lightning is fairly minuscule. The chance of one single bolt dancing down rope and rock on a late-July afternoon in the Tetons to batter six individuals domino-style is, quite simply, infinitesimal.

  FOUR<
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  “I need their names!”

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  Brandon Torres, Incident Commander

  Once the situation was sorted out a bit, it became apparent that the reality was even a little worse than the first dispatch account. There were actually seven people injured, rather than the five originally reported.

  Brandon Torres was the ranger on call for the 24-hour SAR (search-and-rescue) coordinator rotation. The rangers used a military Incident Command System, with the four permanent rangers (Renny, Brandon, Dan Burgette, and Scott Guenther) and five seasonals taking turns as coordinator. Each potential coordinating ranger was on call for two rotations every pay period. Aside from overtime, they worked five eight-hour days a week, then took two days off. Someone was on call at all times. The learning curve for the position was generally considered to be about four years.

  According to the random rotation schedule, Brandon, at age 31, was automatically the incident commander for the rescue, in charge of overseeing the entire operation. Upon receiving the initial report, he requested that the Dispatch Center perform a Jenny Lake group page and contact the closest contract helicopter to respond.

  As he drove to the SAR team’s rescue-operations base in Lupine Meadows, seven miles from the Grand, Brandon had the 911 call transferred to his cell phone and spoke to Bob Thomas, the climber at the top of Friction Pitch who had called for help. As Brandon’s first priority was preventing further injuries, he initially instructed Bob to make sure that everyone was watching one another and tied into anchors. Bob responded that he was still trying to account for all members of his group on the Motorola radios that many of them had been carrying. Brandon assured Bob that help was on the way but that it would take some time for rescuers to reach them.