Lightning prediction system improves recreational safety
Parents have enough to worry about without considering the threat of lightning harming or killing their children at play in the park.
With little or no warning, a severe storm can move in on a Little League game or picnic, bringing with it deadly bolts of lightning. Across the nation, hundreds are injured or killed because of lightning.
Residents of the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill., know this all too well. During the summer of 1996, John Wade, a youth soccer league referee, was killed by lightning when a storm struck faster than the players could clear the field. During the same storm, a suburban Chicago woman suffered minor burns when she was struck by lightning while watching her son play soccer.
In the year after 20-year-old Wade’s death, the Park Ridge Park District installed new lightning predictors from Miami-based Thor-Guard Systems throughout the city’s 18 parks. The local Rotary Club, youth baseball league and Indian Guides groups raised $50,000 to cover the cost of the new equipment.
Unlike other devices that send out an alert once lightning has been detected, the lightning predictor sounds a loud warning horn about 12 to 15 minutes before lightning strikes.
The predictor measures static electricity in the atmosphere, and when conditions are conducive to lightning, it emits a long blast that sounds like an air horn. Once an electrical storm has moved out of the area, three short blasts signal an all-clear.
Ironically, the lightning prediction system may have saved a life exactly one year after Wade’s death. Earlier that evening, a ceremony honoring Wade’s memory had taken place at the park where he died.
An hour later, youth baseball and volleyball players at another park scattered from the field when the alarms sounded. Minutes later, lightning struck a baseball diamond and scoreboard, knocking two people off their feet.
Park Ridge Park Director Steve Meyer says he is confident that injuries and possibly fatalities were prevented last summer as the lightning prediction alarms went off frequently.
The lightning prediction system was used at all outdoor summer Olympics events last year and is now in use at about 10 municipal golf courses nationwide. Hamilton County, Ohio, parks have ordered its installation, as have 10 other park districts in northern Illinois.