What are the odds someone will get struck by lightning?
It’s low, but a lot of kampungs, a lot of places out in the mountains of Indonesia, have a correlation with lightning — kampung petir or pondok petir [lightning towns] — because a lot of people are killed by lightning. When a newspaper reporter is there you hear about it, but otherwise you have to go to the Pak RT [neighborhood head]. So how much force is in a lightning strike? We talk about it in kiloamps, and the maximum in Jakarta or Indonesia is about 200 kiloamps. But the average here in the city is about 50 kiloamps. Can you give us an example of how much power that is? The temperature of this lightning channel is about 10,000 degrees Celsius — higher than the surface of the sun. But it’s an impulse — very short — only about 100 microseconds. So is it possible to survive being hit by lightning? Yeah, especially when you’re wet. The current flows over the body, the skin. Normally, say if people are out playing football, it will hit only one of them. It’s called a point of strike.
