Is there a rationale from science to avoid taking a shower during a thunderstorm?
In: Chemistry
If you live in an area without some sort of municipal water supply, you most likely have a well as the source of water. Unless there is a battery backup or automatically starting generator, there will be no water with which to rinse.
Soapy people are extremely slippery, which increases your chance of injuring yourself getting out of the shower.
(Most of the replies assume municipal water, which makes sense. But, wells are still a thing for many.)
My grandparents had a telephone line that ran between the house and a steel tower. Lightning missed the tower and the lightning rods on the house and hit the phone line. They never found a piece of the phone, and it was one of those indestructible Bakelite things. Electricity can do some weird shit.
I thought this was a Latin American thing cause a lot of the water heaters are electrical things in the shower itself.
Although I am not aware of any statistical studies, there are two physical reasons showering during a storm is not a good idea.
The first is, if your house has metal pipes, it’s possible for lightning to strike some part of your house and the current to find one of the pipes and pass through you into the ground. This shouldn’t happen if your home is properly grounded and because, generally, there is a gap in the “circuit” of your pipes — there is always a physical distance between your taps where water comes out and your drains where it flows out of the house. Showering during a storm could increase the risk of being struck by lightning inside the house because now there is a closed circuit path from the pipes through you to the ground.
There is also a thing called the balo-electric effect. When you shower, little droplets of water fall to the ground and the room fills with mist. Because water contains ions (OH- and H+) and because the negative ions are heavier than the positive ions, the spray near your feet will be more negatively charged than the mist in the shower. This separation of charge creates a small but measurable electric field in your bathroom.
Although this (very small) field alone is unlikely to attract lightning, putting yourself in an electric field during a lightning storm, especially so close to (presumably) metal pipes is not a great idea.
When lightning strikes the ground, the potential at the strike point is about 300 million volts. This potential drops away with distance from the strike point and the resistance of the earth. Even at significant distance, the ground potential can be tens of thousands of volts per meter.
Metal piping in the house should be earthed, preferably at a single point. But if you have a metal pipe feeding into the house and an additional earth some distance away, you now have the possibility of two contact points across the ground potential difference, at many thousands of volts potential difference. This means that the ground potential can now jump through the house plumbing, and being in the mix (in the shower and wet) might be a problem.
Modern PVC plumbing feeds and lines largely mitigates these sort of risks, but it is still a good principle to follow.
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