[graciegirl]

We went to a presentation on lightning last night. It was arranged by our village and they invited a person who posts on this forum who calls himself "lightning".

This man is a villager, does not sell anything, and became interested in protecting his home after realizing that seven homes in TV have burnt to the ground due to lightning strikes in the last eight years..

He did his due diligence exploring the matter and contacted The University of Florida who has experts on the subject. He and a friend who is also not involved with selling any lightning protection have put together a power point presentation on lightning. Central Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. Their presentation involved myths commonly held and much factual and new to me information.

I dreaded going, thinking that it would be boring and also thinking the bottom line was that he owned something that would benefit him monitarily. NOT so. It was very informative and helpful and if you have a chance try to get him to come and speak to your group.

I learned that properly installed lightning rods can almost always protect your home from severe damage. I learned that secondary strikes were a different kind of lightning and required a different kind of protection.

He never mentioned any companies by name to contact during his talk but warned of door to door people who would offer you lightning protection that was inadequate or downright useless. He said they knew of three ethical companies in the area that were approved by Underwriters Laboratories (??) and the University of Florida but did not mention their names.

He recommends reading a book that is in our library here, written by the Lightning experts at University of Florida.

If any of you have questions for him, you can PM him. His name on this forum is Lightning.

He has written good articles about the subject for the POA and also the VHA newsletters. He is an ethical speaker with no hidden agenda in my opinion.

I hope he will read this and reply. I think his name is lightning but not 100% sure.

Our storm season starts June first. I just got an email that tropical storm 01 is now forming out at sea.