The lot next to where I live has a cell tower which gets hit now and then. It is ... way beyond.. loud. The last time it happened all my pets were in front of me within 10 seconds after, as if saying "Pardon sir, we are not programmed for this event! Please advise!".
The induced EMF in my long cables like cat-5 throughout the house and my outdoor observatory also takes out motherboards, DSL interfaces and ethernet adapters each time. These days when I hear thunder I start unplugging devices.
Lightning seems particularly tough on high frequency signal processing hardware. A lightning strike on an invisible dog fence the previous owners had left in place around our house fried, along with a couple of ethernet ports, every HDMI connector that was plugged in in one particular room at the time. Rest of the devices continued to function perfectly, but those HDMI input/outputs were cooked. Similar HDMI devices in another room were totally unaffected. My working theory is that the devices in the affected room were plugged in to multiple power sockets, giving a longer antenna loop through the sensitive components, while in the unaffected room all the devices were running off the same power strip. Would explain why ethernet - connecting devices in different rooms - also seems vulnerable.
Not much more evidence to go on, so it's largely superstition, but as a result I do generally try to keep my whole AV setup - game console, TV, AV receiver, etc. - plugged into a single power strip now.
I also now have a cat who is exceptionally nervous whenever he hears thunder. My wife and son were home at the time and... yes, the sound of a lightning strike at point blank is not just loud, it's.. like a crack in the world.
The 8-bit Guy had a video on this topic. He does a tour of his home wiring setup and talks about his previous setup was completely destroyed by lightning hitting a tree above a buried cable.
I was once walking along a soccer field in Costa Rica during the daily afternoon shower in the rainy season. Suddenly the entire sky beyond the treeline turned completely white. It was like I was looking at a black and white silhouette of the treeline. At the same moment I heard the loudest sound I've ever heard. It was like an explosion; I could feel the ground tremble. I have no idea how close the strike was, only that the sound and lightning were simultaneous from my perspective. It honestly could have been just on the other side of the trees across the field, or maybe half a kilometer away, I couldn't tell you. All I can say for sure is I ran like hell to the nearest house.
I'm not regularly around explosions and such so I've never experienced anything like that before or since.
This is the one thing that can be use to easily tell apart people who have been truly close to lightning, and those who only think they have.
Lightning is a powerful event and even if you're not that close to it, it can appear overwhelming and make you think you were much closer than you were. People who have experienced this talk a lot about what it looked like.
Everyone I know who has truly been close to a lightning strike unfailingly mention the sound above all else.
On a related note, I was in the middle of a major forest fire once. The sound was the most intense thing. Every time a slight breeze started blowing, a deep roar like a freight train filled your chest cavity.
Had a relatively close strike happen during a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm that was intense enough that we had to stop the car entirely as you couldn't even see the hood of the car through the waterfall like rain.
When the lightning struck the thunder felt instant. It was however clear from the admittedly blinding flash that it was still a ways off. Probably some hundred meters.
But as you said, the sound. In a car, in a torrent of rain, it was the loudest and sharpest sound I believe I have ever heard.
By the sound of it I could have sworn it was inside the car as couldn't tell it had been muffled at all by either the torrent of rain, or the bodywork and careful sound dampening in any modern car.
There had been lightning all around us for a while, but we barely heard the thunder of those strikes through the thunderous murmur of the sky falling down on us. The difference was truly astonishing!
I once was driving over an underground transformer when it exploded. A tremendous clap followed by a comparatively long and low hooting sound. Lots of vile smoke.
I was lucky to be in a car. A while back the same thing happened to someone walking over the top of a transformer causing very serious injuries.
I’m always kind of creeped out around iron grilles now.
Well I don't really know what group I fall into because I couldn't tell you how close I was. All I know is it was the loudest noise I've ever heard and I felt the ground shake. Never been in an earthquake so it's the also the only time I've ever felt the ground shake. But 50 meters? 500 meters? No clue.
Thunder is the sound that lightning makes, no? Unless I’m misunderstanding, the two things you’ve described are one and the same.
That being said, if you’re close—really close—the sound does change. Lightning used to regularly strike a pair of trees just outside my bedroom window when I was growing up, since it was the top of a hill, and the trees were the tallest thing around, by far. Were my window open, I could reach out and touch the taller of the two trees.
The sound is so loud and so abrupt that I’m not really sure how to describe it. It’s instantaneous—over before you realize that there was a sound. It’s not a steady, drawn-out rumble like you might expect. In addition to the overwhelming, deafening crack, sometimes I would hear what sounded like a scream or a whistle—but that was almost certainly just a sensory artifact and not a real noise. Other people in the house would describe different artifacts.
I probably make it sound scary, but I always looked forward to thunderstorms as a kid, and each time I’d hope the storm would get close enough to strike those trees. It was absolutely amazing to watch—and, being a child with no sense of danger, I’d sit right by the window.
I have been in a couple "close" strikes where the thunder was trailing the lightning by, maybe, a tenth of a second or so. Although they were several years apart, in both cases I distinctly heard—or maybe felt—a "pop" at the exact moment of the flash, similar to the sound of a high-power flash unit.
Maybe it was my imagination but it was so distinct that I wonder if it was the sound of discharge from nearby objects, or … something.
Both sound and light originate at the same time. Light travels faster than sound. If you are close to a strike, the time gap between lightening and thunder is smaller.
Cat-5 can definitely do it if you're unlucky about cable orientation and length. Years ago I worked in an office one story underground and the whole thing had a cable run along a single wall with drops. One day we got a nearby strike and every single ethernet card fried, but the rest of our hardware was fine.
Long ago I was inside of a church when its steeple got struck by lightning. We could hear the static building up in the sound system before the strike occurred. People said arcs shot from all of the power sockets. There were burn marks on every corner of every wall where it seemed the current couldn't make the sharp bend and jumped out of the metal within the walls. I just remember it being loud.
Years ago I was near a tree that was struck, but did not strike me.
It was like sensory overload, I remember hearing something, but not aware what and I found myself sort of crouched on the ground covered in tinyn (harmless) cuts and the tree bark that hit me.
I remember being aware of noise, but not a specific noise other than a sort of echo of it....and just knowing that a very loud noise had occurred.
Um, I don't know how often this happens but any chance of that damaging your hearing? Because I wouldn't know of any sound I'd even describe like that.
The part about it frying motherboards in your house makes me wonder how the cell tower copes with it. I assume it has a lightning rod but so close to that rod as the tower's equipment is, compared to how close your house is, it must fry everything on the tower? Do they come and replace all electronics on it every time?
I know that it needs time as well, but as the pressure goes up the time might become so short that you could get hearing damage from just that momentary bang. Especially if if's so loud that they describe it with words I would not know to apply to any sound. Hence my question.
> 13. This is just conservation of energy. The initial potential energy was mass times height times gravity. Divide by the 1/20th second that it "rings" out the pressure waves (the sound), and that is acoustic power. Divide by surface area of the toilet bowl lid to get energy flux.
Once I was on a plane that got hit by lightning, and the sound was quite frightening - an extremely loud, but short, bang. There were a few screams and many very worried glances around until the captain casually told everyone what had happened, and that everything was fine.
The induced EMF in my long cables like cat-5 throughout the house and my outdoor observatory also takes out motherboards, DSL interfaces and ethernet adapters each time. These days when I hear thunder I start unplugging devices.