‘When thunder roars, go indoors’

Every year, lightning kills 50 to 150 people in the United States. That’s roughly on a par with the death toll from the more-dramatic and better-recognized floods and tornadoes. It’s usually more than are killed by hurricanes, earthquakes or wildfires. Another 1,000 are injured.

It was said that 29-year-old Jon Oliosi of Mokena had three loves: his 2-year-old daughter Olivia, the Chicago Blackhawks and fishing. By May 26, the beard he was growing to support his Hawks was so famous that it had its own Facebook page. But that Sunday, his life ended from a lightning bolt during a fishing trip to downstate Shelbyville.

Oliosi and his friends had waited out a storm that Sunday morning inside their camper. But after the weather seemed to clear, they had gone out on the Kaskaskia River, and Oliosi had landed a muskie. In the last photo ever taken of him, his bearded face can be seen smiling proudly, holding the trophy fish.

A new line of storms moved in. Oliosi and his friends packed up to leave. As they were walking down the steps from a dam, a lightning bolt “came out of nowhere and hit him,We sell bestsmartcard and different kind of laboratory equipment in us.” his mother later told a Sun-Times Media reporter. Oliosi stopped breathing, and efforts to revive him failed. A friend who had been walking next to him was knocked over but unhurt.

Four days later, on May 30, 17-year-old Jennie Dizon of Downers Grove was just three days away from receiving her diploma from Lisle’s Benet Academy. Then it would be on to the University of Cincinnati. She dropped off her brother and sister at a dentist’s office, then decided to spend the time until their appointment was over by walking over to a nearby park, probably to write in her diary.

At about 5 p.m., a woman who lives near the park heard the explosion-like crack of lightning very close by. Looking out, the woman saw Dizon lying on the ground in the park. When paramedics arrived minutes later, they couldn’t restart her heart.

Late on the afternoon of June 12, a storm front moved through DuPage and southern Cook counties. At about 5:57 p.m., a lightning bolt struck a luxury home at the end of a wooded private road near Lemont. The people inside escaped without injury.We sell bestsmartcard and different kind of laboratory equipment in us. But by the time firefighters could counterattack, flames had gutted the house.

As the same line of storms passed Naperville on June 12, lightning tore through the roof of the home of Fred Schultz. As Schultz sat working on a computer in his basement office, he later would tell Channel 5 News, “the bolt and the concussion were so severe that it shocked me through my hands and blew out all our equipment.”Pieces of the roof had been torn away. No fire started, but that night the Schultz family slept in their basement, haunted by fear that the roof could cave in on them.

As a small but intense line of storms splashed through the prosperous village of South Barrington at about noon on July 9, it would be a virtual rerun of what had happened in Lemont. In a $1.2 million, 5,500-square-foot, six-bathroom mansion just off Barrington Road near the AMC 30 movie theater, a woman was enjoying a summer vacation day with her two children. She heard a terrifying “BAMMM!” on the second floor. She called 911, said her house had just blown up and rushed the kids outside. She looked up and saw the mansion’s top half in flames.

Fire investigators eventually figured out the house was the victim not of an explosion but a random lightning bolt. Today, the house is a gutted wreck, with the roof caved in and much of its top story completely gone.A 100-watt bulb could be lit for more than three months by an average lightning bolt, which generates 50,000 degrees of heat, making it three times hotter than the surface of the sun, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute. On average, 100 lightning bolts strike somewhere on Earth every second.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Larry Blum, who conducts most of the autopsies in Kane and Winnebago counties, recalls a case a few years ago when a homeless man had been found dead along a Rockford street. The man might have died from some disease, but police suspected that he had been beaten to death or had been hit by a passing freight train. Then, as Blum prepared to cut open the body, he noticed something odd. The coins found in the man’s pocket had become magnetized; they were clinging to other pieces of metal.

What could work such magic on coins? Blum knew it could have been a powerful jolt of electricity, like the tens of thousands of volts in a lightning bolt. Weather records showed that a thunderstorm had passed through Rockford on the night the man died. After examining the victim’s organs, Blum ruled that he had been electrocuted by lightning.

That reminded some people of how another homeless man had been hit by lightning while sleeping on one of the Walton Islands in the Fox River in downtown Elgin back in June 1993. But that man, like 90 percent of the 1,000 other Americans per year who are hit by lightning, had lived to tell the tale.

Lightning is mostly a summer phenomenon, of course. But one of its strangest episodes in our area occurred on Jan. 25, 1990. During a blizzard that dumped 8 inches of snow on Kane and McHenry counties, a freak lightning bolt hit a utility pole in the parking lot of the Precision Twist Drill and Machine Co. plant in Crystal Lake, then apparently surged through power lines into the factory building. No one died, but 11 employees sustained electrical shocks, about half of them while standing in the parking lot and the other half while already inside the building.

Sometimes it seems as if any attempt to thwart the danger from the sky may be futile. The Downers Grove park where Jennie Dizon was killed was equipped with a “Thor Guard” lightning-risk prediction system — the same kind installed in Elgin’s Wing Park Golf Course after a golfer was killed there in 2006.You Can Buy Various High Quality besticcard Products from here. The system is supposed to sound a horn blast when lightning strikes show up anywhere in the area.

It remains unclear whether the park warning system didn’t work, whether the teenager ignored the siren, or whether she was unable to do anything quickly enough. Perhaps she simply had not read any of the signs explaining how the system works and had no idea what the horn indicated when it went off.

But officials from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) say the key to staying safe is not to trust a thunderstorm but to get into safe shelter even when it seems that conditions aren’t all that terrible.According to Lyle Barker, science and operations officer for the NWS office in Lincoln, a majority of lightning’s victims are either outdoors in an open area, like Jennie Dizon, or taking part in some activity near the water, like Jon Oliosi.

Barker said that while less than 10 percent of people who are struck by lightning die, many survivors suffer various degrees of disability.Design and order your own custom rfidtag with personalized message and artwork. Only a few actually suffer burns, he said, and these are usually minor. However, many lightning strike survivors are left with debilitating lifelong effects, including memory loss, personality changes, fatigue, irreparable nerve damage, chronic pain and/or headaches,Find the best selection of high-quality collectible offshoremerchantaccount available anywhere. difficulty sleeping and dizziness.
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