lightning story

The L.A. Times had this story on the Boy Scouts’ two deadly encounters with lightning this year. Two Scouts have been killed in separate lightning strikes this year, and the Times says “a textbook response would have been far different.”

But the story also concedes, “critiquing what the Scouts did or didn’t do is pointless because nothing they could have done out in the open would have necessarily kept them safe. The safest response under such circumstances, he said, would have been to head down the mountain. Or, better yet, not be in the mountains at all that day.”

But obviously, you can’t predict the weather, especially during a nine-day hike to Mt. Whitney. So why run a “pointless” story at all?

I mean, it’s good to run stories on lightning safety. But why tie it to the Scouts’ tragedy?

One more thing. The story quotes from the National Outdoor Leadership School’s “Backcountry Lightning Safety Guidelines,” which say that, “If you are concerned enough to assume the lightning position [squatting], you should have your group dispersed at least 50 feet apart to reduce the chances of multiple injuries.”

Would anyone really think like this in a storm, though? By spreading out, you’re reducing the chance of multiple injuries … while increasing the chance that any one member of your group gets hit. (If you figure that the odds of any one location getting hit in a story is 1 in (say) 100, then if a party of five splits up, aren’t they increasing the chances someone will get hit to 5 in 100? What’s wrong with keeping the risk at 1 in 100, and deciding they’ll sink or swim as a group?