Never think your'e safe from lightning.

From a friend about his buddy's house that burned to the ground. Being on a bike or in a car is no guarantee either.

I mentioned about Ron’s house being struck by lightning and how lightning rods could be of help. HE HAD LIGHTNING RODS! The lightning struck the tree in their yard and you can see the paths it took. You can trace the root system by the holes blown in the ground. The lightning then made it to the UNDERGROUND entrance cable and followed it into the house. There is a trench blown in the yard where the cable was located. The fire had several points of origin in the house all of them electrical and the panel in the garage being the one that did the deed. Everything in the house that was plugged in was fried. Appliances, TV’s, phone chargers, everything. Inspector said if they had been home and was touching an appliance or anything that was plugged in they would be dead. His wife has a pacemaker with a defibrillator, if she would have been in the house and not even touching anything she would have been dead. The electrical field was that strong in the area. They were the only ones who burnt, but neighbors several houses away lost electrical items from the surge. The cable guy was in the neighborhood sitting in his truck until the storm passed when it hit the tree. He said he has never seen anything like it, dirt flying in the air where the lightning was blowing up out of the ground. Lightning rods are good, but not very effective when the lightning comes up from below

Lightning rods help but can't completely guarantee safety from lightning. It's entirely possible a single rod could be hit by a very high energy bolt and be overwhelmed. After all it can't carry any more current to ground than the amount of current the grounding system can carry. Most seem to be pretty lightly wired to ground. Also if your ground is dry or very non-conductive like most ly stone it's hard to get a good ground system.

Another thing is how few people realize how vulnerable a motorcycle rider is in lightning. There's usually a couple people killed by lightning on bikes every year. In a car the auto's metal shell is a Faraday shield which will conduct the current around the passengers. On a bike the tallest part of the vehicle which has no shield is one's head.

Some people think it's the rubber tires that protect occupants of a car but that has nothing to do with it. If a lightning bolt can travel through thousands of feet in air it doesn't have any problem jumping 4" or so from a wheel rim to ground.

https://www.news-journalonline.com/news/20190610/motorcyclist-death-on-i-95-expert-warns-you-cant-outrun-lightning

I don't volunteer to ride in the rain or storms. If I'm riding and get caught in a storm that's a different thing. If it's just a "normal" rain I keep riding. I just chalk that up as my monthly shower. Not really. I actually take two showers per month.

From family in Florida, seems we will have little to say when or where or how.

Hmm, very interesting. We had a similar situation with our next door neighbor’s house a few years ago: lightning struck a tree in the front yard, and it travelled through the roots to the porch, lept through the air to the doorbell (blowing a hole in the concrete block wall in the process), and entered the electrical system. Numerous appliances were fried. It then got into the phone line, went out to the pole and into our house, blowing out a light bulb (as in cracked glass) and frying a GFCI outlet on the other side of the wall where the service connect was. Thankfully neither us nor them were at home at the time...or we’d at least be a little deafer than we are. Fact of the matter is, lightning rods are designed to dissipate the electric charge in the air to help prevent lightning striking...but it can still find a way in, as we both know. Wild stuff!

Lightning is a spectacular example of static electricity. Static electricity used to be a pain when I lived in Northern Alaska. For nearly six months a year every time you reached for a door knob you needed a key to touch it with before grasping the knob. Otherwise the electrical shock would give you a nasty jolt. Living with most of the moisture frozen out of the air had it's "joys".