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34
s.
tvin
9
January, 1949
Farmers now protect their lives and their livestock by grounding wire fences. Sad experience has taught the knowing farmer to ground isolated trees, too, for such trees — used as shelters by cattle during a storm— invite destruction from the skies.
If an electrical storm whips up, you'll find greater safety if you forego sitting on a radiator, monkeying with the stove, or taking your bath. And if you have a fireplace, avoid it like the plague. For lightning Hkes to sneak down a chimney and the resultant "sideflashing" when it emerges in your fireplace can kill you if you're nearby.
One woman was cooking supper when lightning paid a surprise visit to her kitchen. Luckily, in her yard was a pipe which a power crew had driven into the ground. The gruesome visitor danced along the window ledge, hopped onto a ma^e of tree roots between the house and the pipe, wiggled along the roots to the metal pipe 155 feet away. After the bolt had discharged itself harmlessly into the ground, awed neighbors investigated
and discovered that the bolt had plowed a ditch 4 feet deep and 18 inches wide in its hurry to reach the pipe!
If you think that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, you're
wrong. The Empire State Building in New York City, for example, is hit by lightning around 20 times yearly. In one year, more than 40 direct hits were counted. But people inside the nation's tallest building don't mind these frequent visits. The huge mound of stone, plus the framework of steel, actually is a gigantic hghtning rod which also protects all other structures in the vicinity.
A golfer recently was electrocuted by a bolt on the fairway of a New Jersey golf course. His friends were grieved — and amazed. For 25 years before, the same man had narrowl missed being killed by a bolt on th same fairway, three feet from wher he finally met death!
And in Newman, Georgia, light ning tore loose a plank from th house of one Ralph Potts. Five yea" later, a second bolt snatched the sam plank completely off the Potts home Your chance of being struck b lightning is three times greater tha normal if you live in New Mexico Arizona, Georgia or Mississippi, ac cording to insurance companies whi keep a record of such violent death Ten out of every million persons ma expect to die from lightning in tho states each year.
In the United States as a whol around 2,000 individuals are killed o injured by lightning each year. Jul and August arc the worst lightnin months : the majority of deaths alwa" are recorded in their 62-day span.
Many old wives' tales are based on the subject of lightning. Rumor to the contrary, you can use your phone during an electrical storm, for the ; telephone utilities now use protectiv^^