INTERESTING FACTS
- Lightning bolts travel at speeds of up to 60,000 miles per second.
- A single lightning bolt travels through twisted paths in the air that can be as wide as one of your fingers or from six to ten miles.
- A flash of lightning is brighter than 10,000,000 100-watt light bulbs.
- A flash of lightning can pulse as much power as there is in all the power plants in the United States in that split second.
- A flash of lightning could power a light bulb for a month.
- Trees sometimes can survive direct hits from lightning because the electricity passes over their wet surface and go into the ground.
- Florida is the lightning capital of the United States.
- 10% of all people struck by lightning were in Florida at the time.
- In March of 1991, a single six hour storm stretching over Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri caused more than 15,000 lightning strikes. During the storm the skies were blazed with almost constant lightning.
- Lightning can be made in a laboratory by an instrument called a Van de Graaff static electricity generator which could generate million of volts of artificial lightning from a metal
sphere mounted at the top of an insulated column.
- About 71.4286% of all people struck by lightning still survive.
- Temperatures in the path of a lightning bolt can reach as high as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.