LIGHTNING PROTECTION
I’ve recently made the acquaintance of a kindred spirit, Melanie Sue Bowles, who with her husband, Jim, operate the Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary. Please do visit them at http://www.horsesofproudspirit.com and see the wonderful job they’ve done with bringing horses “back from the brink.” Melanie has written a book, The Horses of Proud Spirit, and a PBS documentary has been produced about Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary. Melanie’s horses stay outdoors all the time (Proud Spirit is in Mena, Arkansas) so lightning protection for a barn isn’t a major factor. But! There’s always a concern for lightning that strikes in the open, and since there are some ways to protect against that danger, I thought I’d pass on the information now, before the “thunderstorm season” gets underway.
I’ve had two experiences with lightning and they were as close as I ever
want to get to one of Nature’s furies. The first happened on a hot,
humid Ohio summer afternoon. I was in the house and looked out a window
to see the brilliant blue sky of a few minutes ago being rapidly replaced
by clouds that were a sickening grayish-greenish mass of something-horrible-about-to-happen. All
eight of my horses were out in our back pasture, grazing peacefully, completely
oblivious to the approaching storm. As the clouds advanced, I ran to
the pasture gate and bellowed our standard “calling the group in” cry of
“Blackie, Dinner.” This usually brought an instant response since the
herd leader, Dakoto Blackie, thought every meal was a gift from the gods. If
Blackie headed for the barn, so did everyone else. But, of course,
that didn’t happen this time when there was an actual emergency about to
occur. I could see Blackie, head down, munching away. The back
pasture was a quarter-mile down a lane and I headed that way, still calling
out, “Blackie, Dinner” and getting no response. My herd looked like
a diorama of Breyer horses against the most ominious sky I ever saw in my
life. Lightning began to flash. I reached the back pasture gate
and yelled again. This time Blackie heard me, snorted in pure joy at
the word, “dinner,” and took off for the barn, leaving me to huff and puff
my way back up the lane to the barn (I hadn’t quit smoking at the time—a
horse with terminal pneumonia would have been in better shape than I was).
My horses were
trained to leave and enter the barn via a runway, so when I staggered back to the
barn/pasture gate, it took only a couple of minutes to get everyone inside. No
sooner had Amigo (low man on the totem pole) got his butt inside the barn door,
then lightning struck our water trough, not six feet from where the horses had
congregated while waiting for me. The ground shook, my skin tingled, and
when the thunder caught up to the flash, I thought I’d blown my eardrums. Now,
when a dark sky gets that greenish tinge, I shudder to think what might have happened
if I’d been even a minute slower.
The second instance
was one of those “messages from on high.” It occurred just after the rain
had ceased following a summer thunderstorm. This time the horses were inside
and I was cleaning stalls. As soon as the last raindrop fell I pushed my
60-pounds-empty, heaped-high, steel-tray contractors wheelbarrow out to the manure
pile. I was almost there when a lightning bolt hit close enough to yank the
wheelbarrow out of my hands, toss it about ten feet off the ground, and spill all
its contents right on top of me. I barely escaped being hit by the wheelbarrow
itself. After I got done trembling, I realized how lucky I was to only need
a shower, not an emergency room or morgue. The message: just because the
rain has stopped doesn’t mean the storm activity has also ended. Wait about
30 minutes to make sure a storm is truly over.
I want to take
a short break here so you can read David H. Levy’s article, “When the Big Clouds
Gather” that first appeared in the May 18, 2003 issue of PARADE Magazine. This
article provides an excellent overview of what lightning is all about and what
you can do to protect yourself. As you read his article, picture your horses
in pasture or yourself in a show ring when a thunderstorm approaches.