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CNN Live At Daybreak
Violent Weather Across Parts of Country This Weekend
Aired July 21, 2003 - 05:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Violent weather across parts of the country this weekend. A man and wife were killed by lightning on Saturday during thunderstorms in Utah. The three children were also hurt. The parents had taken refuge with the children under some trees and they were sitting in metal chairs when the lightning struck.
In Canada, a 14-year-old girl was struck and killed by lightning while playing at a soccer tournament. Twenty-two others were taken to a hospital as a precaution.
Lightning strikes 40 million times a year, killing about 100 people. Each bolt heats the air to 50,000 degrees, which causes the thunder clap.
Let's go to Chad now in the forecast center to tell us much more about lightning and the ways you can protect yourself.
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Carol, we have a -- I've just made a lightning map here. They've been trying to make me do this as fast as I could, so I got what I got here. Just in the past couple of hours, literally now, literally in the past four hours, this amount of lightning coming down here from Detroit right on down into Cleveland.
Do you believe 25 million lightning strikes a year to the ground, from the cloud to the ground? And 70 something, it's like 72 people killed by lightning every year, where only 68 people are actually killed by tornadoes. So we worry about one thing when we should actually be worrying about something else. Only 17 people annually killed by hurricanes. So try to stay away from those trees, especially from under the tree. If you're playing golf, not the place to be. Get in the cart and get to a building somewhere. And obviously if you're on the boat and you're on a big flat lake, you're the highest thing out there, and that's what lightning likes to hit.
Sometimes lightning comes down and sometimes lightning goes up. It can go both ways. Your eyes are not deceiving you sometimes. If you said that thing didn't come from the cloud, that thing came from the ground, yes it can. It's all about the discharge between the charges up here, up way aloft where the storm is, and the charges down here, down at the surface. When that spark wants to go across, almost like when you take that jumper cable and you put that one cable on one car and the other cable on the other car, as soon as you get that positive over to the positive by the dead car, you're going to get a little spark, whether you try to or not. You always try not to. That's why you want to use the ground lasts and hook it to the frame of the car, so if it sparks, it's not sparking by the battery, it's sparking by something that doesn't have any gases in it, like the battery does. We always talk to you about that. You can read your owner's manual. You can find out.
The same kind of thing happens. You've got positive, you've got negative, and the spark is much bigger, obviously. But you're not talking a 12 volt battery, either. You're talking about many, many, many thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of volts between the cloud up there and the ground down here -- Carol, back to you.
COSTELLO: All right, thank you, Chad.
MYERS: Sure.
COSTELLO: Interesting information this morning.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired July 21, 2003 - 05:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Violent weather across parts of the country this weekend. A man and wife were killed by lightning on Saturday during thunderstorms in Utah. The three children were also hurt. The parents had taken refuge with the children under some trees and they were sitting in metal chairs when the lightning struck.
In Canada, a 14-year-old girl was struck and killed by lightning while playing at a soccer tournament. Twenty-two others were taken to a hospital as a precaution.
Lightning strikes 40 million times a year, killing about 100 people. Each bolt heats the air to 50,000 degrees, which causes the thunder clap.
Let's go to Chad now in the forecast center to tell us much more about lightning and the ways you can protect yourself.
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Carol, we have a -- I've just made a lightning map here. They've been trying to make me do this as fast as I could, so I got what I got here. Just in the past couple of hours, literally now, literally in the past four hours, this amount of lightning coming down here from Detroit right on down into Cleveland.
Do you believe 25 million lightning strikes a year to the ground, from the cloud to the ground? And 70 something, it's like 72 people killed by lightning every year, where only 68 people are actually killed by tornadoes. So we worry about one thing when we should actually be worrying about something else. Only 17 people annually killed by hurricanes. So try to stay away from those trees, especially from under the tree. If you're playing golf, not the place to be. Get in the cart and get to a building somewhere. And obviously if you're on the boat and you're on a big flat lake, you're the highest thing out there, and that's what lightning likes to hit.
Sometimes lightning comes down and sometimes lightning goes up. It can go both ways. Your eyes are not deceiving you sometimes. If you said that thing didn't come from the cloud, that thing came from the ground, yes it can. It's all about the discharge between the charges up here, up way aloft where the storm is, and the charges down here, down at the surface. When that spark wants to go across, almost like when you take that jumper cable and you put that one cable on one car and the other cable on the other car, as soon as you get that positive over to the positive by the dead car, you're going to get a little spark, whether you try to or not. You always try not to. That's why you want to use the ground lasts and hook it to the frame of the car, so if it sparks, it's not sparking by the battery, it's sparking by something that doesn't have any gases in it, like the battery does. We always talk to you about that. You can read your owner's manual. You can find out.
The same kind of thing happens. You've got positive, you've got negative, and the spark is much bigger, obviously. But you're not talking a 12 volt battery, either. You're talking about many, many, many thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of volts between the cloud up there and the ground down here -- Carol, back to you.
COSTELLO: All right, thank you, Chad.
MYERS: Sure.
COSTELLO: Interesting information this morning.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
