One-in-a-million volts – Woman captures lightning strike on Meredith Bay

MEREDITH — Laura Lucas’ family gets more excited than most do when an electrical storm is brewing, and for good reason, as the home she grew up in, in Chicopee, Massachusetts, was struck by lightning three times during her childhood.

When the thunder started rolling while the Lucases were visiting Laura’s parents’ Pleasant Street home in Meredith on Aug. 7, several of them went out onto the deck to watch the storm roll in over Lake Winnipesaukee’s Meredith Bay.

“One of my kids said, ‘Mom, can I take a picture of the lightning?’” Lucas recalled. That would be impossible, she responded, because the flashes come and go in an instant — she would never be quick enough to catch the image.

Then, when they started seeing lightning off in the distance, something made Lucas pull her iPhone out, open the camera app, and point it across the lake, her finger poised over the button. That’s when lightning struck the lake halfway across the bay, directly in her camera’s line of sight.

The group was so startled by the lightning strike that it took several moments before Lucas looked down at her phone and realized that she had taken a one-in-a-million shot. The shutter of her phone’s camera was open for one-thirtieth of a second.

“I said, oh, my goodness, I just captured what I saw with my own eyes. It was just purely by luck,” she said.

It was also lucky that a boater didn’t get electrocuted right before their eyes.

“The most fascinating thing was just how many boats were out in the water as I was watching that kind of lightning. Probably 30 seconds before, we saw a boat go right through there,” Lucas said.

She had always heeded the advice, “When there’s lightning, you get off the water.”

That’s sound advice, said Lourdes Avilés, meteorology professor at Plymouth State University.

“The best thing to do, if there’s a thunderstorm, is to get out of the water,” said Avilés.

Lightning tends to strike the highest point in an area, she said. For the same reason it’s a bad idea to be a golfer on a fairway during a thunderstorm, it’s similarly dangerous to be out in the middle of a lake.

“If you’re in a boat, your head would be the highest point,” Avilés said.

When lightning strikes the water, it doesn’t continue straight down to the lake bottom, Avilés said. “It spreads out around the surface.” Fish and other underwater wildlife, even if they’re directly underneath the site of the strike, would be fine, she said; but nearby boaters, especially if they’re in a metal-hulled boat, wouldn’t be so lucky.

“You definitely could get, indirectly, a good jolt of electricity.”

Avilés said that a single bolt of lightning can easily deliver tens of millions of volts. “At least 100 feet away, it can still be felt.”

Lucas, who now resides in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and who posted the image on the “I boat on Lake Winnipesaukee” Facebook page, said she was glad to have captured a phenomenon that has made its mark on her family.

“I just snapped it, it’s a pretty awesome moment to catch,” Lucas said. “Me seeing that and capturing it on the water was something special.”