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Digital-age perils

Listening to iPod during a storm is dangerous

TRENTON: Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes.

A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning travelled through his music player’s wires.

Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.

Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices such as beepers, Walkman players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.

Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from Massachusetts, who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cell phones. They are described on his lightning safety website, www.struckbylightning.org.

Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices do not attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.

“It’s going to hit where it’s going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity,” said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ER doctor at University of Illinois Medical Centre in Chicago.

When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices — or metal jewellery or coins in a pocket — can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.

A spokeswoman for Apple, the maker of iPods, declined to comment. Packaging for iPods and some other music players do include warnings against using them in the rain.

Lightning strikes can occur even if a storm is many kilometres away, so lightning safety experts have been pushing the slogan “When thunder roars, go indoors,” said Dr. Cooper.

Jason Bunch, 18, says it was not even raining last July, but there was a storm off in the distance. Lightning struck a nearby tree, shot off and hit him. Mr. Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Colorado, still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and “a bad line up the side of my body,” even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.

The Canadian jogger suffered worse injuries, according to a report in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The man, a 39-year-old dentist from the Vancouver area, was listening to an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm when, according to witnesses, lightning hit a tree a couple of feet away and jumped to his body. The strike threw the man about 2.5 m and caused second-degree burns on his chest and left leg.

Eardrum ruptures are considered the most common ear injury in lightning-strike victims, occurring in 5 per cent to 50 per cent of patients, according to various estimates — whether or not an electronic device is involved. A broken jaw is rare, doctors say. — AP

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