Fact vs. Fiction on CSI Miami Death by Lightning Ep
P.S.: I forgot to say that, if Horatio had only given AccuWeather Forensics a call, we could have given him a plot of lightning strike locations to within an accuracy of a few hundred meters by consulting with Vaisala, who maintains historical records of such. That could have saved him some time speculating whether or not it was, in fact, lightning and we could have even gone to court with him if needed :)
CBS' "CSI: Miami" crime scene investigation drama aired an episode this Monday called "Bolt Action" (you can watch it for free on CBS' site). It might have better been labeled "Death by Lightning" but that would have given away the ending (stop here if you don't want spoilers).
The premise was that a murderer had constructed a lightning rod consisting of several golf clubs (sans heads) taped together. This, combined with a "bolt from the blue" from a nearby storm (not near enough to disrupt play) and a buried wire under a volleyball court, spelled quiet death for three volleyball players.
I'm not Mythbusters so I don't want to get into questions like whether the wire would have been able to electrocute the players sufficiently to kill them... here I want to concentrate more on the weather aspects. First, let me say that, overall, they did their research on this one. I've seen a lot less accurate and more unbelievable science scenarios in other shows and movies. Here's a list of quotes or situations from the show and my comments on them:
"Lightning can strike out of a clear sky and travel up to 30 miles, it's called a "Bolt from the Blue" --CSI Jesse Cardoza
I'm glad that they are promoting the idea that you can be killed far outside of a thunderstorm. "Bolts From The Blue" as they are called are a serious problem and I have blogged about situations where people were killed from them both in Miami and on a beach from an offshore thunderstorm like the one depicted in this episode. Depending on who you ask, the number is sometimes lower than 30, rarely higher.
Although it depends on how you measure it (does "outside the storm" mean "outside the core of the storm", "outside the rain", "outside the clouds", "outside the other lightning"?), 25 miles outside of a storm is the number that has been measured, and anvil lightning (which could simply strike down from the top of the storm which blows considerably downstream) can strike up to 50 miles from the storm. And finally as I mentioned last summer "spider lightning" has been documented as traveling 118 miles through a series of storms. If you do a Google search a lot of government sources quote "10-15 miles" which I don't think is sufficient enough to scare people into realizing this is a real danger, so I applaud the "30".
"It's actually fulgurite, also known as petrified lightning... and lightning turns sand (into glass)" -- CSI Horatio Cane & CSI Boa Vista
I was happy that they mentioned something as geeky as Fulgurites (tubes that are formed when lightning turns sand into glass), something I have personal experience with as I once unearthed some after a strike (see photos below or here). The show insinuated that fulgurites form around wires, when in reality they form in plain sand or dirt as the lightning travels through it - I'm not sure if they would form around a wire or not but the flashback slo-mo animation of the fulgurite is pretty darn cool, I've never seen that visualized before but it seems reasonable.
"Lightning strikes all around Miami every day, highest rate in the country." - CSI Boa Vista
Actually she's a little far south. Florida's "lightning alley" is considered to run from Tampa to Orlando across the center of the state [WikiPedia] (so maybe Courtney Cox should use it as a murder weapon - her show is supposed to take place near Tampa). Overall though, most of Florida experiences the highest rates in the country. Here's a map from NOAA/Vaisala:
ABOUT THOSE CGI EFFECTS: The 1-second lightning effects shot (done later in the show as a flashback, no pun intended) was decent looking (something they created with Adobe After-Effects, their blog says). It's nearly impossible to mimick lightning in effects that would satisfy any meteorologist and the depiction was acceptable. What wasn't acceptable, unfortunately, was the tiny cumulus cloud that the lightning came from. "Bolts From the Blue" would be coming from large, highly developed thunderstorms and in my opinion the small cloud shown couldn't have produced lightning at all. It shouldn't have been hard to find a stock photo of a decent thunderstorm.
THE BIG FLUB: The biggest inaccuracy is that the lightning made no sound when it struck. Regardless of where the lightning came from, the thunder that you hear is loud when it strikes close because it is striking close. It looked like to me that the lifeguard stand was 100 feet away at best - at this distance the thunder would have been so loud that it would have certainly been heard in the scene, probably causing people to jump in unison or be knocked off their feet (you'll have to trust me because I have been in this situation several times). Listen for example how loud the thunder is in this video which is a strike documented at between 1,000 and 2,000 feet away.
Another inaccuracy is the lengthy amount of time that it takes for the people to be electrocuted and drop to the ground (one by one). This either insinuates that the electricity stayed around for a while and/or they had to keep stepping in different places to get the most of it (the wire carried the charge in but there was conductive material scattered about). Lightning strikes take a fraction of a second, the people would have been immediately knocked down. It isn't a slow process.
CSI Boa Vista also makes an assumption that the lightning would have hit the highest location on the beach. That's not necessarily true, we don't really know what lightning is attracted to, but it is some combination of height and conductivity. Lightning routinely hits the beach or the ocean however.
And finally "bolts from the blue" are rare, something they alluded to in the show, but the odds of a strike hitting a lightning rod erected the night before are probably a million or more to one. Maybe had the rod been left there for several years it would have been struck during a volleyball game but still conditions would have to be such that there was not lightning close enough to the game for it to be called off.
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