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I’m sure it follows logic along the lines of “everyone I know has been following the crouching guidelines their entire life, and none of them have been struck, so it must work!”
Or like "if I duck lower than a fence pole than the lightning strikes the fence pole." But it's a conductivity thing, an open field of wet grass is a crappy situation.
Would lying flat and wriggling your way to safety like a big wet human worm help? Or always traveling with a taller, damper friend?
Lying flat, especially with a wet contact to the ground is about the worst you can do. Especially in tne mountains, where voltage gradients reach much farther from the point of the strike.
It is true that lightning is much more likely to strike a fence pole, but it is also true that being near a fence pole which gets gets struck is still extremely dangerous, as the main plasma channel will arc to other things in the area, and just generally creates a massive, dangerous electric field which extends out for several meters.
None of them have likely won Lotto either, but they don't stop playing.
If you're the tallest surrounding structure, you're the lightning rod
Technically true, but there's other factors:
- Even if you're crouched, you may still be the tallest structure (e.g. you're in a big, open field).
- As the NLSC states, crouching prolongs the amount of time you're in danger with little benefit over running to safety (I suppose if there is no safety, it's better than nothing, and the CDC guidance does list this basically as a "last resort").
- Even if there's a taller structure near you (crouched or not), lightning causes electric currents along the top of the ground that can be deadly more than 100 feet away from the strike point.
Height has basically nothing to do with it - it's the accumulation of static charge in a conductor which produces the dielectric breakdown of air. Even though the human body is a relatively poor conductor, it is still a much better conductor than the ground itself. It makes no difference if your head is 6 feet above the ground or three feet above the ground - you will accumulate charge the same way.
Also most strikes on people are not direct strikes, but people being close enough to to the primary plasma channel to provide another path to ground. The electric potential required to produce an arc from 5 feet away is orders of magnitude lower than it is from 3 miles up.
Also most strikes on people are not direct strikes
That's the very reason why it is indeed helpful to crouch when there is no safety nearby. Putting your feet close together reduces the step voltage (the voltage across your feet), making it less likely that a deadly current flows through your heart when there are strong potentials on the ground.
The idea of the crouch is not really to be shorter than surrounding structures (maybe that is a minor aspect), but rather to reduce the step voltage (the voltage between your two feet). If you have only one point where you touch the ground, as you do when your feet are very close together, the risk of deadly currents passing through your body is minimised. This will of course not help you when the lightning strikes you directly, but that is not the most common case anyway. People usually die from the large current passing by their heart when they stand next to a lightning strike, and there is a distribution of electric potential across the ground. This is not a myth and not debunked. It's just a matter of priorities. If there is safety nearby, you should obviously seek it out. If not, however, then to crouch is the best thing you can do.
If you’re caught outside during a thunderstorm, the best plan of action is to move as fast as you can to a safer place
institutions such as the American Hiking Society and the city of Bellmead in Texas continue to include it in their lightning safety guidelines.
A lot of times when hiking or backpacking, you may be hours from a safer place. In those cases, it probably is better to crouch than to try to run down a mountain during a thunderstorm.
The actual crouching to lower your height may not help much, but keeping your feet close together to minimize surface contact probably does help reduce your chances of dying to a nearby strike.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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