IPOD's are dangerous while thunder stroms !!

In a recent incident Bunch, 18, was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colo., last July when lightning struck a nearby tree and knocked him unconscious. Bunch sustained similar burns and ruptured eardrums. He still suffers some hearing loss, but it is mild.
That is not the case of the Vancouver jogger. When Heffernan contacted him last week to alert him to the pending publication of the story, the man, now 39, gave Heffernan an update on his status two years later.

He has about 50 per cent hearing loss in both ears and wears two hearing aids. He no longer plays in the church orchestra because of his hearing deficit. "There are probably many notes he can't hear," Heffernan said.
In addition to the perforated tympanic membranes (eardrums), the man suffered dislocation of the tiny bones in the middle ear known as the ossicles, which conduct sound to the cochlea of the inner ear.


Surgery was needed to patch the eardrums with grafts as well as to reset the jaw, which was dislocated from both joints, and to fix the bone, which had been broken in four places. Heffernan said with this type of damage to the jaw it's likely the man will develop arthritis in it, and at an early age.

People who witnessed this close encounter of the electrical kind reported the man was thrown about 2.4 metres by the lightning's impact.
Rather than a direct strike, these cases may have been what is called a side flash or a side splash - when lightning coursing through an object breaks out and strikes something else nearby as well.

When that something is a person, the current is often conducted over the exterior of the body, because skin conducts electricity poorly. That phenomenon is called a flashover.
"But it's things like sweat and metal in contact with the body like this guy had that just caused some of the current to go through him," Heffernan explained.

(Heffernan, who is from Ireland, didn't actually work at Vancouver General when the man, who at that point couldn't hear a thing, was brought in for treatment. When Heffernan arrived at the hospital last summer to start a two-year radiology fellowship, he heard about the case and convinced two other radiologists - including one who was involved in the man's care - to write it up, arguing it belongs in the medical literature.)