How does lightning not strike homes more often? Houses and apartments are everywhere , surely some stray lighting strikes should hit them and cause them to burn up. Even if they’re not the most conductive objects in the area, shouldn’t at least more be struck?
In: Earth Science
Well, over the years home’s have been built to not attract lighting. And also electrtions put most of the major electrical things (like a huge wire that splits off into different directions to give power to all the homes in the vicinity like a condo complex) away from homes to greatly decrease the chance of a home being struck. I’m not the best at explaining so if there’s anything that you did not understand in this comment please feel free to ask me and I will explain it better.
They do hit them pretty often. Usually houses have lightning rods in them. They are usually steel rods on the roof which goes down all the way into the earth a few meters deep, where it is grounded. This protects the houses from any harm that a lightning would do to it.
There are two things to consider.
The first is that lighting aims for the tallest items in the vicinity – in a suburban area this will often be things like large trees which can regularly be taller than the houses surrounding them.
The second is that when taller items aren’t nearby, structures will take the hits. We know this happens though, so we can prepare by fitting tall buildings or other structures with lightning conductors that will safely transfer the energy from the lightning to ground.
So this means that trees end up being fairly obvious targets – as we can see the damage impacted on them – while buildings tend to get hit in a much less spectacular and firey way.
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