The World Meteorological Organization (OMM) confirmed Thursday that the longest lightning never measured before extended for 829 kilometers in different areas of the United States in 2017.
The weather phenomenon occurred in October of that year, during a strong storm, and in an instant illuminated areas between Texas and Kansas, “a distance that a car would take to travel eight or nine hours, or a commercial plane in 90 minutes,” said the agency in a statement.
The new record, also published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, has been taken advantage of by the OMM to remember that many people die by rays every year, so the prevention of these phenomena is essential and must be part of the campaign undertaken by the agency to extend at global level an early warning systems before disasters.
“The new finding must serve as a call for rays that can travel very long distances and have an impact on the aviation sector, or cause fires,” said the General Secretary of OMM, the Argentine Celeste Saulo.
The agency recalls in its statement that it is advisable to take refuge in protected places of rays when it is proven that they are less than 10 kilometers away.
The safer environments to take refuge in these cases, according to the OMM Walt Lyons, are buildings with electrical wiring and pipes (which can channel electricity in case of impact) and also vehicles with metal cover and completely closed.
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The margin of calculation error presented this Thursday is 8 kilometers, but in any case you exceed the previous record, a lightning of about 768 kilometers that was recorded in the same area of the large plains of the US, a very prone region to strong storms with great electrical apparatus.
Until recent dates it was unknown that lightning could also be horizontally deployed at great distances, but advances in satellite measurement in recent years have allowed to improve this type of measurements.
The OMM also keeps a registration of the longest lightning lightning, a flash that lasted just over 17 seconds in a storm unleashed in northern Argentina and Uruguay the month of June 2020.
On the other hand, the ray that caused the most direct deaths in history was the one that produced the death of 21 people by impacting a cabin where they took refuge in 1975 in Zimbabue.
Indirectly, the most deadly was the one that caused 469 dead in Dronka (Egypt) in 1994, when burning crude oil deposits whose flame content was extended later by the population.
With EFE information
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