By Frank McCathran
With severe weather season underway in most parts of the U.S., we may soon see news reports about young student athletes whose lives were tragically cut short due to lightning strikes that claim dozens of lives and injure hundreds more every year. Whether heading out to field hockey practice, playing a local rival on the football field, setting up for band practice or participating in a soccer game during gym class, student athletes and spectators will spend millions of hours outside on school grounds during warmer months when weather is typically more severe and unpredictable.
Understandably, when a tragedy does occur, people search for answers and often look for someone to blame. Soon outdoor activities return to normal, leaving students unprotected. We’ve all seen outdoor activities continue even when lightning flashes appear because no one is watching the sky. Students are concentrating on the game, coaches are watching the athletes, and parents are cheering on their kids. Yet lightning can travel over 10 miles from a storm, even when skies appear clear — putting all at risk from a direct or indirect strike.
As someone who has worked as a coach in my personal life and with school districts, athletic directors and other outdoor safety decision makers on weather monitoring and alerting systems for 15 years, I’ve seen the benefits that schools and organizations can realize from deploying outdoor severe weather and lightning alerting systems.
Recently, Lee County High Schools in Fort Myers, Florida took a leadership position among school districts across the country by deploying weather stations, lightning sensors and outdoor alerting solutions to protect more than 25,000 high school students, staff, and the larger community — those who live, work or just happen to find themselves near a school when the alarm sounds — to help protect from lightning and other forms of severe weather.
Like many school districts, the county had practiced common sense when it came to lightning safety: watching the skies, counting the time between lightning flashes and the roar of thunder, and taking outdoor activities inside when skies darkened. Other school districts have used older, unreliable hand-held lightning detectors or products that claim to “predict” lightning, which is not possible with current technology. Regardless, these approaches are less than ideal.
To remove the human factor and eliminate the guesswork from safety-related decisions, Lee County is installing weather stations equipped with lightning detectors on the rooftops of 13 high schools. These instruments detect “total lightning” which includes lightning that stays in the clouds and lightning that hits the ground. When lightning is detected within a predetermined radius, such as 10 miles around school property, the system automatically produces a high-decibel, attention-getting signal. Faculty and staff are also alerted to lightning and other dangerous conditions on their computers and phones. Additionally, they have access to a visualization tool on computers that allows them to track the actual lightning strikes that are causing their school to be under alert — something older systems cannot do. Once conditions improve, an all-clear sounds so that activities can be resumed.
Schools play a vital guardianship role and must take steps to ensure the safety of their students, faculty and staff — and even the community. Automated lightning alerting is a reliable option that provides peace of mind to decision makers both on and off the field. These solutions take the guesswork out of making a tough decision and provide the opportunity to establish sound severe weather and lightning policies. Together, these complementary solutions and protocols create a best practices approach that work in unison to help serve as a comprehensive risk management tool.
McCathran is Director of Enterprise Solutions at Earth Networks – WeatherBug
