Youve probably heard that lighting which strikes a building can get into wiring or water pipes to kill someone talking on a phone with a cord or who is taking a shower.

How does lightning strike kill you. The biggest danger when lightning strikes manifests in the form of ground currents in which the electricity from the lightning spreads out in the form of a deadly current on the ground gradually getting weaker as it moves away from the point of contact. Any fish within a few meters of the strike area would probably be killed but beyond that they would probably just feel a tingle. In addition ground current can travels in garage floors with conductive materials.

Anyone outside near a lightning strike is potentially a victim of ground current. When lightning strikes land it dissipates through the surrounding ground. Trees can often be destroyed by lightning strikes.

The electrical energy after hitting a large object such as a tree on Earth spreads laterally on the ground for some. Injuries range from severe burns and permanent brain damage to memory loss and personality change. Those who survive a lightning strike with temperatures that can heat the surrounding air to 50000 Fahrenheit often suffer permanent injuries to the brain heart or other parts of the body.

We know that water is a good conductor of electricity so if lightning strikes water it will generate a current. The intense heat generated by a lightning strike can burn tissue fuse skin cause lung damage and the chest can be damaged by the mechanical force of rapidly expanding heated air. Can sheet lightning kill you.

Lightning rarely hits people directly but such strikes are almost always fatal. A lightning strike can act as a massive fibrillator upsetting the hearts electrical rhythm and causing cardiac arrest. If lightning does hit the tree theres the chance that a ground charge will spread out from the tree in all directions.

Rather than creating an direct narrow path concentrating the punch the charge from the lightning strike spreads out sideways and downwards in an expanding half sphere from the surface. But when enough charge accumulates in the cloud it finds a way to get to the ground and lightning strikes. This spreading out forms an arc on the ground almost as far as 60 feet from where.