As Technology Spreads, Electrical Hits That Once Just Made the Lights Flicker Now Fry Computers, Phones and Web Connections
By JUSTIN LAHART - Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009
It is summer storm season in Florida, and when lightning threatens, technicians at cable channel HSN fire up eight massive generators to ensure the home-shopping network won't lose power.
This time of year, HSN's generators get switched on two or three times a day. The St. Petersburg company is at the western edge of what meteorologists call Lightning Alley, a 50-mile-wide swath across Florida that gets more lightning than any other place in the U.S. To lose power, or even to have a brief surge or sag in its flow, could create havoc for the high-tech equipment on which the company depends.
Over the past decade, 425 people in the U.S. have been killed by lightning. Last year, fires started by lightning strikes burned 8.9 million acres of wildland. Insured losses to homeowners from lightning damage amounted to $1.1 billion.
But in the information age, lightning matters in ways it didn't before. A blip in the power supply that in the 1980s might have caused only a flickering of the lights can now fry circuits, shut down servers and deaden phone systems, effectively stranding a business.
New research even suggests that lightning's effect on technology can shape the course of regional economies. After analyzing lightning data for the lower 48 states, four economists from the University of Copenhagen found that those states more prone to lightning strikes tended to see worker productivity grow more slowly than in states with very little lightning.
This held true when the economists controlled for a range of other factors, including hurricane frequency, urban density and the education, age and racial characteristics of local populations.
The economists concluded that the use of computers and the Internet spread more quickly in areas less prone to lightning strikes, boosting worker output there. This lightning effect didn't exist prior to the 1990s, say researchers Thomas Andersen, Jeanet Bentzen, Carl-Johan Dalgaard and Pablo Selaya, when the advent of the Internet led to the rapid adoption of information technology in the U.S. and an accompanying surge in productivity.
But Humboldt University of Berlin economist Michael Burda, who has reviewed the paper, cautions that something other than lightning might still be at work.
"Have they really controlled for everything, and could it not be that it's something else that is correlated with lightning strikes?" Mr. Burda notes that his home state of Louisiana sees a lot of lightning, but also has a poor electrical infrastructure that could be acting as more of a hindrance to economic development now than before information technology took off.
Denmark sees about as much lightning as California, where thunderstorms are rare and there is only about one lightning strike per square mile in any given year, according to data from Vaisala Inc., an environmental and industrial measurement company. In contrast, the Tampa area sees nearly 40 strikes per square mile each year. In fact, Florida is the lightning-death capital of the U.S., with 70 fatalities over the past 10 years. Runner-up Texas had 27 lightning deaths.
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