Lightning Sensors

This morning’s Houston Chronicle featured an article written by Eric Berger, “Scientists hope sensors will improve strike predictions” (linked via title bar). According to the story, Houston leads Texas with the number of lightning strikes and is second only to Florida in lightning strikes per square mile.

“Scientists now believe they can improve their predictions of which thunderstorms will produce lightning by studying the meteorological seeds within clouds that lead to ground strikes.”

I work outside making keys, often times during inclement weather at the leading edge of a thunderstorm’s wrath. The wind picks up or changes direction and I wonder how much time I have to finish a job before the sky falls. I don’t like working in the rain and I sure don’t like pushing my luck when there’s a chance of lightning; holding my favorite impression file as a lightning rod. This is supposed to be a technically oriented article so I must have been holding my 8 inch Swiss Grobet # 4 round impression file with matching wood handle.

When my son William was very young I could take him along on jobs. One afternoon I was fitting a trunk key to a Crown Victoria on the back lot of Scott & Sons, a small car lot on Shepherd where it intersects with Parker. The weather was moving in quickly so I had William get inside the truck while I raced to finish making the impression key. William pleaded with me to get in with each clap of thunder, flinching as he watched the pink fingers streak out from the ominous dark skies.

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck reacting to the electricity in the air, similar to when I unloaded warm dry towels from the dryer and watched as the hair on my hands follow the static clinging between the folds of cloth. I had an uneasy feeling; that it was time to get inside and out of harms way. I was pressing my luck standing with my lightning rod “sensor” in one hand, my shoulders drawn together in anticipation of the next lightning strike and working as fast as I knew how. The key turned and I polished the ramps for it to enter and exit properly, ran off a finished key on my duplicator and got inside the cab of the truck.

Within a heartbeat of having shut the door lightning struck the telephone pole next to the car I had just finished making keys for. I watched it dance down the telephone lines headed north for several hundred yards, jumping over the poles in the distances until it evaporated.

You know how they say time stands still when you become part of a life threatening event; maybe that’s a chance to understand the eternities, that existence when we have no need for the observance of time. How else could I have witnessed lightning strike so close and travel across the wires and never hear the thunder clap that surely must have accompanied it? William and I acknowledged the close call as we swallowed and gulped simultaneously.

I suppose scientists could place fancy electronic equipment all over the city. They can study how, when and where lightning strikes and learn a great deal; they might even improve forecasting dangerous storms; but nothing will take the place of common sense, things like my mother would ask, “Don’t you have sense enough to get in out of the rain?” “Getting older does not automatically guarantee getting wiser”, mom has lots of these little sayings; her favorite has become, “Hang up and drive”.