Lightning Strikes in the Villages
 

During the recent storm we had Friday night into Saturday morning three homes in the Villages were struck by lightning. One serious with a fire and the other two no fire.

Too see and read the article on the terrible strike in Charlotte Google "lightning-strike-punches-hole-in-roof-of-home-in-the-villages" and click on the first article by the Villages News too see all the pictures.

Lightning is unpredictable and it looks like these people are not going to be living in their home for a while since there are probably not a lot of contractors waiting around to rush and repair this home and it takes a while for the Insurance to assess and pay for the damages. I'm also assuming with a strike this large that several neighbors around this home had major power surge damage to their electronic devices and appliances.

The reason why I'm posting this is because we live in one of the lightning capitals of the world due to our proximity to the east and west coast weather here in Florida. Random lightning strikes is something we need to live with, especially with all the new homes. Last year a lightning strike in one of the new areas would have occured in a field. Today, there is a home there.

The Villages Lightning Study Group has been giving free community service non-commercial educational presentations in The Villages on lightning since 2009. They address personnel lightning safety indoors and out, surge protection, lightning protection systems (LPS), and dispel many of the myths and misunderstandings about lightning.

One of the misconceptions they dispel is that lightning protection systems do not work. Lightning protection systems have been proven effective for over 200 years and they do work if they are designed, installed, and maintained according to the National Fire Protection Association-780, Standard for the Installation of Lightning Protection Systems, 2023 Edition. The Principles of Lightning Protection are discussed in Annex B. They also suggest that only firms listed by UL with craftsmen who have met the Master Installer criteria of the Lighting Protection Institute be considered when selecting a contractor.

Another reference used in their presentations is The Art & Science of Lightning Protection Systems, by Dr. Martin Uman, from the University of Florida who has been studying lightning for over four decades.

Over the years there have been may studies that have proven the advocacy of LPS. One such study was conducted at the University of Florida's International Center for Lightning Research & Testing at Camp Blanding.

Lightning Protection Systems are used world-wide and locally have been installed on all water & sewage stations, every building in Sumter Landing including your former retail store, all the sales centers, the Sharon, Savannah Center, most churches, the new schools, the hospitals, the developer's own homes, and many Villagers have chosen to protect their own residence.

I mention this NOT to sell Lightning Protection and power surge systems but to make everyone aware that there are free presentations being given in the Villages giving the facts so homeowners can make a more informed decision based on their tolerance for risk and their specific situation. Nothing man made is 100% effective but there is a good chance if these homeowners had a Lightning Protection System installed by a certified UL listed company that they may have been spared this unfortunate event.

I don’t believe there are any lightning systems installed in my immediate neighborhood. Most do have some type of surge protection. Maybe they are too expensive to install and maintain?

The price will depend on the roof size of your home, how many roof peaks you have, if you have a bird cage, gas, etc.. But most systems for a designer home will be between $2,000 to $3,500.

As far as maintenance, every 3-5 years you call them and have them come out and check the connections and the status of the grounding rods. Cost $100-$150.

If you get a new roof, they will uninstall the system and re-install it at a nonimal cost.

I have a metal roof. My risk is minimal without any fancy extra doodads and gizmos.

I would like to see a discussion of lightning protection (sharp pointy objects) on your roof, versus the devices SECO uses at some of their substations, these look like a large Dandelion bloom. I worked in this industry and these are designed to DISSIPATE the charge and avoid the lightning strike. Sharpe pointed objects then at ATTRACT lightning strikes. These are applied to ATTRACT the strike to the protective wiring and away from the roof. May point is why not have the devices that dissipate the charge installed?
Looking forward to an interesting discussion.

I see CMCE lightning suppressors advertised that say they will "eliminate the threat of lightning strikes". Sounds too good to be true.

Question - there has been discussion of the cheap gas lines in attics with the never ending goal of reducing costs. I wonder if they would run a length of non-conductive (PVC?) line up to the attic so the attic line would not be grounded - would that lessen the chance of lightning hitting the gas line?

Does that mean my neighbor, who has a higher roof than i do and has lightning rods will protect my house from a strike? Im going with that theory.

I don't think PVC can be used for gas. The lawsuit of several years ago the Weather Club talks about every year was the thin gas flexibility gas pipes from the gas manifold to the various gas appliances. The best solution is to have thick pipes as my previous home up north. The previous owner of my home took the money from the lawsuit and had the lightning medication system put in. There is also a grounding wire from the manifold to Earth.

Maybe someone from the Weather Club will have additional information.

NO, it will not protect your home!!

TOTALLY AGREE!

lightning prevention versus lightning damage minimization expecting to be hit.

Lightning rods are great if the structure is a high probable target, not so much with very low probability targets. . . Low probability should have lightning strike prevention, not lightning strike damage minimization. .

then I am willing to listen and act

The Villages Lightning Study Group did do research on this type of device and the data is inconclusive on if it actually works. The theory is good and there are a lot of entities testing these devices. There is some thought that conventional lightning rods can and o "bleed off" some of the charge in the air potentially preventing a strike but only if the charge is not great enough to jump and strike.

Conventional lightning rods used today do not attract lightning in the sense that if the ionization of the air over your neighbors house was prime for a strike, the lightning charge would not divert and hit your house with lightning rods instead. It just doesn't work that way. We have actual case data on strikes here in the Villages where homes were hit with a home next to them and across the street with lightning protection systems. We also have cases where a home was hit with a very large tree behind it in the yard. Lightning struck the house and not the tree. The problem when analysing lightning strikes is its unpredictible. It depends on the ionization of the air at any given time above your house during a severe storm. All the lightning protection system does is, if lightning strikes, instead of punching a hole in your roof and then ricocheting around your attic like a bullet destroying everything in it's path searching for earth ground, the low electrical potential of a lightning rod on the roof will send the charge safely to ground.

If you are interested, next time we do a presentation, come by and see what the group has to say and you can speak to John Shewchuk our resident meteorologist about the conditions where lightning strikes.

What would happen to PVC gas line In a fire?

I'm not sure how you can classify one home in the Villages more of a target than another. In all the cases the study group has documented, there was nothing that would indicate one home being more volunerable than another. In fact the strike in Osceola Hills last month was just an ordinary large designer home.

If there were some technology to prevent lightning strikes that would be great but until there is something like that, that's proven, its best to just install a lightning and surge protection system which is better than doing nothing.

Just to be clear. Eventhough your home is insured, the insurance company is not going to quickly pay a very large claim like this especially if the strike causes a large fire and does a lot of damage. Also, there are not contractors waiting to rush and fix and or rebuild your home. We have documented case information from actual homeowners here in the Villages who can colloborate that it's a life changing event if your home is struck by lightning and it causes a lot of damage. Some of these homeowners have not been able to return to their homes for over a year and in some cases rebuilt as best they could and sold the home. So all this said, you need to determine your tolerance for risk then decide to do what you can or nothing and play the lottery since we live in one of the lightning capitals in the world and there is no denying that fact.

While talking about lightning strikes for those interested here real time lighting strike map for next thunderstorm.
Real Time Lightning Map :: LightningMaps.org

I see few in my neighborhood, any idea guess how much lightning rod setup cost on small CYV?

I think these are in most older homes in villages?



“”. The gas piping is known as corrugated stainless steel tubing, or “yellow CSST.” “Homes with yellow CSST are at risk of perforation to the gas line caused by lightning strikes which could cause gas leaks or fires,” says Insurance Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart.Jun 18, 2015 “””


IMO needs to be class action law suit.

Enclosed in garage wall and insulated. Just wondering if there was a way to isolate attic metal gas pipe from ground.

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It occurred to me that the appliance end of the gas line is grounded anyhow, so my idea has no merit. :>(

Many jurisdictions hav banned the use of "yellow CSST" "black CSST" is more resistant to electrical energy.

L
 

My friend had a lightning rod it got hit and started a fire in the attic

We had a LPS installed several years ago after attending a talk at the Science & Technology Club. Made absolute sense & we feel it’s kind of like an extra ‘insurance’ on our villa, paid a reasonable price and feel a bit ‘easier’ when there’s a storm.

We paid about $1300

There are many ways that lightning can damage your home and it doesn’t have to be a direct strike, and most aren’t direct hits. Right now, my friend that lives 1/2 mile away from the home that got hit with lightning, his internet service has been out since then and his neighbors had their TVs destroyed. Again all explainable.

Let’s ignore the direct hit, this is self explanatory, get lightning spikes installed on your house.
Power surges are very common and can damage equipment in your house so a whole house surge suppressor will help eliminate these surges.
The 3rd issue is something nobody addresses and that’s the copper cable coming into your home from a network or cable tv provider, which nobody suppresses. Every device that is connected to this copper cables is susceptible to a surge and will be damaged. Most of my surge suppressor indoor units have a rg6 connection to eliminate any surges.
There are many stories on lightning hitting a tree then having the voltage go down the tree trunk, hitting the power lines and then the neighbors experience a surge which damages their indoor appliances

- If the fire was in the attic then the charge from the lightning went into the attic
- A lightning protection system (LPS) should carry the charge along cables to the ground and not let it into the structure
- A poorly installed LPS might not have sufficient grounding and therefore would not carry the charge away
- You mention a singular lightning rod installed. A proper LPS would have multiple "rods" at different points on the roof, at least one at each end of the peak. If he had only a single rod then it was not a properly installed LPS system.
- Nothing is 100% effective; the LPS should significantly decrease the likelihood of damage but cannot totally eliminate it

There was, so they added a black plastic coating to CSST imtended to seal a pinhole leak to "reduce" the risk from that can happen with a nearby lightning strike. I would have happily paid the extra cost of iron pipe.

Having metallic gas lines in the attic is one of the main reasons I had a LPS installed.

Lightening hit the iron gas line where it comes into the garage at the meter on three homes near us the past 5 years. One home completely destroyed, still not habitable two years later.

It almost as if the homes have a single lightening rod consisting of the grounded iron pipe from the gas meter into the attic where it connects to the metallic gas line?

What evidence is there to prove or disprove if they work? Often there is a storm in the middle of the night (last night for instance) when I woke up hearing a loud crack of lightning very close. Apparently no homes burned down, no sirens. Quite a few of the homes in my area do have lightning systems so maybe one was stuck but the system worked. Unless there is a witness to a direct strike how do we really know? I imagine over the years at least a few people in TV must have witnessed one of these events.

Your anecdote says nothing about whether having a lightning protection system reduces the risk of a lightning strike anymore than saying another friend who installed a lightning rod has not been hit by lightning.

The best evidence you could look for would be examples of protected houses being damaged by lightning. Have there been examples of homes with an LPS being damaged?

It still would be valid to suggest that maybe no homes with LPS were damaged because none were hit. But over time as more and more homes are damaged, it would statistically significant if none of those homes had an LPS system.

your paragraph #1, I didn't say that I was classifying each home differently just because they were hit, I am saying that given the number of houses in TV, each house has a low probability versus a 10 story building, or a large metal structure such as an electrical substation in the same area.

your paragraph #2, there is lightning strike prevention equipment, regardless whether your group has validated their effectiveness or not. . they are in use around the country in high value / high probability targets.

your paragraph #3, FUD bias as its not related to points about strike versus damage prevention systems, but the results of damage when hit.

LPS will NOT prevent a strike.

If you have a LPS & you have a strike, you will have damage.

You are absolutely correct. When lightning strikes anything, home, tree, ground, etc, meaning cloud to ground strike, we always hear a loud bang depending on how close it is to our house. But if it hits an object we usually see a fire and that tells us what happened. On the other hand if your home had a LPS for example, and lightning hit and was safely shunted to ground, unless you were actually standing outside your house at that moment, you would not know what actually happened. The Villages Lightning Study Group has I believe 16 documented cases of homes that the owners believed were hit by lightning. From one we have the damaged lightning rod, and in the others there was some evidence of the grounding cable getting hot and scortching a bush branch touching the wire.

Too little data exist to have reliable evidence about the effect size of lightning protection systems. Controlled experiments are impractical because lightning strikes on structures are too infrequent and random. Collecting quality data would be very costly. Anecdotes are not data.

All one has is theory and common sense about the effect of LPS. Then the personal decision whether paying for a LPS is worth it is — personal.

It's not FUD bias. The point I was trying to make is regardless of what anyone thinks about lightning protection systems and their effectiveness, when your home gets struck by a significant strike and causes major damage to your home, it has the potential to be a life changing event. At some of our presentations, homeowners in the Villages who's homes have been struck by lightning come and share their experiences. Just relaying the common post strike experiences most of these people have.

Key word: Prevent.

‘Prevent’ and ‘lowers risk’ are not the same.

About a year ago my neighbor’s ac was struck by lightning, knocking out the electric items in the garage. Surprisingly the house next door was unaffected by a surge. Another person in our neighborhood had her fountain struck and it damaged the front of her house. Surprisingly it did not hit the highest point of either home. That is baffling to me as I always thought that lightning hit the tallest things. As far as I can see, only one neighbor has a lightning rod installed but there are many flag poles which I would imagine attract lightning. Hmmm

Actually, much is known about lightning and the effectiveness of lightning protection systems.

One of the misconceptions is that lightning protection systems do not work. They have proven effective for over 200 years and they do work if they are designed, installed, and maintained according to the National Fire Protection Association-780, Standard for the Installation of Lightning Protection Systems, 2023 Edition. The Principles of Lightning Protection are discussed in Annex B.

Another reference is The Art & Science of Lightning Protection Systems, by Dr. Martin Uman, from the University of Florida who has been studying lightning for over four decades.

Also over the years there have been may studies that have proven the advocacy of LPS. One such study was conducted at the University of Florida's International Center for Lightning Research & Testing at Camp Blanding.

There are many other references and data.

As far as the newer systems which try and prevent a lightning strike, as some have commented, yes these devices are currently installed and being evaluated for their effectiveness. NASA has an elaborate setup at the cape.

LPS will not DRAW a strike either. LPS are there to provide protection in case a strike occurs.

"Will have damage"? Is that speaking from experience or skepticism? Is the damage that "will" occur when lightning strikes a house with an LPS of the same magnitude as the damage that occurs when lightning strikes a house without an LPS?

There is an article from 2021 in the newspaper that shall not be named with the statement, "Over a dozen Villagers, with an LPS, have reported that their home was struck by lightning and in no case was there any fire or structural damage." No, that doesn't say there was no damage at all but I will take some singed shingles or burnt rods over the hole in the roof that was recently pictured in the same paper.

Never said it will draw.

Never mentioned magnitude.

:faint:

Thanks for this good points. What you are describing is an "Induced power surge" as a result of a lightning strike. As you correctly state, this happens way more frequently than damage from direct strikes to property. It's just not discussed and reported because it's not as sensational to the news outlets as someone having a huge hole punched in their roof or the whole house totally destroyed by fire as happened in Linden Village last year. You mainly hear about these events from your neighbors at local gatherings, etc.. You are also correct in that most induced power surges travel into your home through the cable and or telephone lines and or your irregation system. If you have cable, there are devices you can buy on Amazon that will protect your home from these surges. With Fiber internet service this isn't a concern becasue no copper wiring there. Unfortunately, I don't know of a device that will protect intrusions from the irregation system.

As one of the engineers in the Villages Lightning Study group I focus on Power Surge Protection. To add to your very accurate comments, here is what we say about induced power surges. I've posted this response several times when this topic comes up.

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When lightning strikes near your home you may get hit by an "induced“ surge which frequently trips circuit breakers, especially freezers and door openers in your garage but depending on the intensity can damage your HVAC system, inside and out, all your appliances, electronic equipment, pool and spa equipment, etc.. Surge protection is a layered system. There is a surge protector you can purchase or rent from your electric company mounted on the electrical meter as discussed here in this thread, which will protect you against surges coming in from the power lines. This happens statistically 20% of the time. The electric company has a sophisticated surge and grounding system to protect from this type of event and because most power surges don't come into your home from the utility, many who have this device still report surge damage in their home and the surge protector at the meter shows no sign of a surge. In addition to the surge protector at your electrical meter you can install what is called a "whole house surge protector". There are many but the Eaton Ultra is one of the more affordable and effective ones that's commonly installed by most electrical companies such as Pikes and Lenhart. This surge protector is mounted at your electrical circuit breaker box. Because it’s located at the breaker box the other 80% of the power surges you can get such as at the outside HVAC unit, pool, spa, outside lighting, etc., will be shunted by this device at the circuit breaker box and reduce and or eliminate the surge from spreading to the rest of the circuits in your home. Because surges are so fast, the surge protector has to be as close to the source as possible to be effective. The surge protector mounted on the electrical meter can help, but it's not designed to shunt these other types of induced surges. Its sole purpose is to reduce large surges coming from the power lines or surges induced into the power lines coming to your home so the rest of the surge protectors in your home can handle the level of the surge that remains. It can also shunt power surges origination from the rest of your electrical system but not to a low enough level for total protection. This is why their warranty doesn't cover any device with an electronic board. The "whole house" surge protector mounted in your circuit breaker box will protect your appliances, washer dryer and all other devices that are hard wired such as the HVAC air handler and your electric hot water heater because it's designed to shunt surges to either eliminate them or shunt them to a low enough level that your devices or other surge protection can handle the surge. The final protection are the surge protection power strips, plug-in or point of use surge protectors which you install at your TVs, computers and any other sensitive electrical equipment. These devices will shunt and protect your equipment form any remaining surges that get through your meter or whole house surge protector. If you want to go further you can install point of use surge protector outlets or plug-in protectors for your microwave, dishwasher, garage door openers, etc. and or hard-wired surge protectors at you outside HVAC unit, pool and spa equipment.
To summarize, Surge Protection is a layered system. You want to install surge protectors to reduce and or eliminate the power surge so by the time an initally large surge reaches your home devices it's small enough for the point of use surge protector to handle it. Damage from power surges is covered in your homeowner’s insurance but you still have to pay the deductible and deal with replacing all the damaged devices. We live in the lightning capital of the USA so investing in surge protection is probably a wise investment but like insurance, it depends on your tolerance to risk. Most of us have at least $1,000 deductible on our homeowner’s insurance which more than pays for the surge protection I discussed here. At the end of the day, you need to look at what it will cost to install a surge protection system, at a minimum installing something like the Eaton surge protector in your circuit breaker panel and point of use surge protectors at your TV, computer and other sensitive devices, vs your tolerance for risk. Eventhough your insurance will cover devices destroyed by power surges in your home, you will have the inconvenience of dealing with the insurance company, having to replace everything that was destroyed and probably get an increase in your insurance premium at your next renewal.
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In reading about this topic when it came up last year, I came across a description of LPS design that used the concept of a rolling ball. The idea is that lightning doesn't come from the clouds directly to the ground in one arc, instead it makes several jumps of about 50m until it reaches ground.

At some point it will have reached close to the ground. From there, it will "look" for the easiest path to the ground that is 50m-100m away. If the top of the flagpole is closer than the fountain then it will go to the fountain. If the tree in the front yard is closer than the peak of the house then it will go to the tree. It doesn't go to the tallest thing around, it goes to the tallest thing within 50m to 100m.

Rather than thinking of flagpoles and lightning rods as things that attract lightning, think of them as the highest points within 50m. One flagpole in front of the house will not protect the back of the house. One lightning rod on the roof will not protect the entire roof. That's why an LPS system will have several rods on the peaks of a house.