During an electrical storm, you should avoid water, plumbing, corded electronics, open fields, and anything that gives lightning a path to reach your body. Almost two-thirds of lightning deaths between 2006 and 2021 occurred during leisure activities like fishing, boating, playing sports, and spending time at the beach. Knowing what to stay away from, both indoors and out, is the difference between riding out a storm safely and putting yourself at serious risk.
Plumbing and Water
Most indoor lightning injuries happen through conduction, meaning the electrical current travels along something that connects the strike point to a person. Metal plumbing pipes are one of the most common pathways. Lightning can travel long distances through metal, and water itself is an excellent conductor of electricity. That combination makes any contact with your plumbing system risky during a storm.
Skip showers, baths, and even washing dishes until the storm passes. The National Weather Service specifically recommends avoiding sinks, bathtubs, and faucets. If lightning strikes your home or a nearby utility line, the current can follow metal pipes directly to wherever water is flowing. This applies to any faucet in the house, not just the one closest to where lightning hits.
Corded Electronics and Appliances
Anything plugged into a wall outlet is a potential conductor during a lightning strike. Avoid touching computers, televisions, or their power cords. Corded landline telephones are a well-documented source of lightning injuries and should not be used during a storm. Cell phones and cordless phones, on the other hand, are perfectly safe because they have no physical wire connecting them to your home’s electrical system. Remote controls are also fine to use.
Lightning generates powerful electrical surges that can damage equipment even when the strike hits some distance away. Standard surge protectors will not stop a direct or nearby lightning strike from frying your electronics. But here’s an important detail: do not try to unplug equipment once the storm has already started. Reaching for a plug during active lightning puts you at risk of being the path that current follows from the outlet to the ground. Either unplug before the storm arrives or leave everything alone until it’s over.
Concrete Floors and Walls
This one surprises most people. Concrete itself doesn’t conduct electricity well, but the metal reinforcing bars (rebar) and wire mesh embedded inside it do. Lightning current can travel through these hidden metal frameworks, which means lying on a concrete garage floor or leaning against a concrete basement wall during a storm is genuinely dangerous. The National Weather Service warns against both. If you’re sheltering in a garage or concrete structure, stand clear of the walls and stay off the floor. A chair, a mat, or simply standing rather than sitting on bare concrete reduces your contact with these hidden conductors.
Open Fields and Tall Isolated Objects
Outdoors is where the real danger lives. Lightning can injure you in several ways beyond a direct hit. A “side flash” occurs when lightning strikes a tall object and the current jumps sideways to a nearby person, especially in humid air. “Ground current” spreads outward from the strike point through the earth, and anyone standing nearby receives a jolt proportional to how close they are. Both mechanisms can be fatal.
Avoid open fields, hilltops, ridgelines, and anywhere you’d be the tallest object around. Stay away from isolated tall trees, as sheltering under a single tree is one of the most dangerous places to stand. Bodies of water are especially hazardous because current spreads efficiently across the surface. Get out of pools, lakes, and off boats at the first sign of a storm.
Work-related lightning fatalities account for about 18% of all lightning deaths, with farmers and ranchers at highest risk, largely because they’re caught in open terrain with no quick access to shelter.
Structures That Don’t Protect You
Not every building keeps you safe. Sheds, picnic pavilions, tents, covered porches, and carports offer no meaningful lightning protection. These open or partially enclosed structures lack the electrical grounding and conductive shell needed to route lightning around you. A safe building is one with wiring and plumbing that can channel a strike to the ground, or a hard-topped metal vehicle.
Your car is actually one of the safest places to be during a storm, but not because of the rubber tires. The metal body of the car acts as a Faraday cage, a hollow metal shell that channels electrical current around its surface rather than through the interior. The current glides over the metal exterior and never reaches you inside. This only works with fully enclosed, metal-topped vehicles. Convertibles, golf carts, and vehicles with fiberglass bodies don’t provide this protection.
The 30-30 Rule for Timing
A practical way to judge when a storm is dangerously close: when you see lightning, count the seconds until you hear thunder. If that gap is 30 seconds or less, the storm is close enough to strike where you are, and you should already be inside. If you can’t see the lightning, hearing thunder at all means the storm is within range. After the last flash of lightning, wait a full 30 minutes before going back outside. Lightning can strike well ahead of or behind the visible rain, so a storm that looks like it has passed may still pose a threat.
Pets and Outdoor Animals
The same conductors that threaten people threaten pets. Dogs chained to metal stakes or housed in outdoor kennels with metal frames are at risk if lightning strikes nearby. Bring pets indoors before the storm hits. Once inside, keep them away from plumbing fixtures and off concrete floors, just as you would for yourself. If you’re caught outside with a pet, seek an enclosed building and avoid metal fences, posts, or the underside of vehicles, all of which can transmit current from a nearby strike.