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July/August 2000 issue	IN THIS ISSUE: Table of Contents Feature: Struck by lightning The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Re:Sources

Christine Fram was struck by lightning on August 6, 1997, while inside a building, which is a relatively safe place, in Vancouver, where there is relatively little lightning. In that split second, she joined the 60 or so Canadians who are struck by lightning each year. She was not among the six or seven who die but was among those whose lives were, as she says, "rewritten" by the experience.

Then 28 and an apprentice auto mechanic, Fram was standing near a metal workbench in the Grandview Tire and Auto shop on Commercial Drive. Lightning struck the power lines outside, surged through to an electrical box on the wall inside, travelled down to the bench, then jumped across a metre-wide gap to her left hand. She heard a bang and saw a blue flash. A man near her saw the bolt. A blue glow filled the room.

Fram felt pain in her left hand. There were holes in her rubber gloveS, and the rubber sole of her left shoe was melted. Her muscles twitched. Her heart beat irregularly. She was stunned and confused, having weird thought processes, feeling as if she wasn't breathing. Pain spread over her left side, then numbness. She couldn't walk. Her boss drove her to the hospital.

Stupendous bolts of electricity come hurtling from the sky roughly five million times a day worldwide. Considering that each thunderstorm — there are 2,000 in progress at any one time — produces thousands of flashes, it is remarkable that more people aren't injured or killed. Detection systems across Canada and around the world are now helping reduce that risk by sensing almost every bolt, logging its location, direction, timing and frequency, and thus improving our ability to forecast severe storms. We have by no means tamed this force of nature, and we still have much to learn about its impact on humans, but we do know how much damage a bolt can cause and how to protect ourselves.

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