Comments & Curiosities:

Did you hear it? I did. Everyone was talking about it.

Wee hours of the morning Wednesday, half asleep, you see that white flash at the window, another, then kaboom. Doesn’t happen much in Newport-Mesa Land but I like it when it does. That’s because I like thunderstorms. Always have. Where I come from, in a land far, far away, the flash/boom thing is a way of life.

I was reminded of that last week while I was in Miami on business. Thunderstorms are a daily summer ritual in Florida and they did not disappoint. Had two good shows and one spectacular show. Very cool — standing at the window of your hotel room on a stormy evening, watching the clouds over the ocean while bolts of lightning split the sky. Makes you tingly all over.

Luckily, no one around here was hurt in this week’s thunderstorm, but about 3,000 Newport-Mesa residents lost power and a number of traffic signals went ka-bloo-ee when lightning slapped around a few transformers in both cities and turned a palm tree on Cliff Drive into a giant tiki lamp.

All of which was a gentle reminder that lightning is not your friend, and if you don’t know what to do when you see the flash and hear the boom, tingly all over could take on a whole new meaning.

Not to worry, though. In the U.S., assuming you lead a fairly normal life — no mountain climbing, no sailing around the world in a small boat — your odds of being struck by lightning are the same as my writing something that’s actually funny — about 1 in 500,000.

Your odds of being killed by lightning are even better — about 1 in 3,000,000. See? It’s all good. Those odds drop dramatically if you live in Florida however. Florida is the bona fide real-deal command central for lightning strikes in these United States.

They have the perfect weather for it — a constant, unsettled mix of storm clouds and hot equatorial air that butts heads, or air, with colder air from the north.

The lightning capital of the world? No contest — equatorial Africa. There are areas in the Republic of the Congo that experience 200 thunderstorm days a year, which is a lot of kaboom. No wonder the wildlife is so cranky.

And here is a stat from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that hit me like a bolt of you-know-what: lightning is the No. 2 “weather killer” in the U.S. — about 100 deaths a year — more than hurricanes or tornadoes and second only to floods.

Has anyone been hit by lightning more than once? More than you can count, and probably more than they can count, because being struck by lightning can do some very strange things to people — like erase portions of their memory, cause or cure migraines, change their personality and either make them hyper-sensitive to sound and light or leave them incapable of feeling hot and cold.

Sometimes the effects take months or even years to kick in, and very little is understood about how and why those things happen, other than the fact that your nervous system is very complicated and really doesn’t appreciate being jangled senseless by a bolt of lightning.

Who is the lightning strike king? Again, no contest. His name was Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a U.S. Park Ranger in Virginia who died in 1983 at the age of 71. Sullivan’s nickname was “The Human Lightning Rod,” and he earned it the hard way.

Incredibly, Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times and lived to tell about it seven times. The first was in 1942, while he was doing his park ranger thing in a lookout tower. Roy would get zapped six more times over the next 35 years: in 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1977.

The ’70s were either the best years in Roy Sullivan’s life or the worst. I can’t decide. The last lightning strike happened on June 25, 1977, while Roy was fishing on a lake. He was seriously burned over most of his body but still survived.

Assuming you’re not Roy Sullivan, and I’m pretty sure you’re not, what should you do when you see the flash and hear the boom?

If you’re on or near water, get out of it and away from it, fast. If you’re on land, get inside, right now, either inside a car or a building. No canopies, no sheds, no tents and none whatsoever of the worst possible choice in a thunderstorm — under a tree.

You’ve probably heard of the “Flash-to-Boom” method of calculating how far away lightning is: Count off the seconds between the light flash and the boom and divide by 5 to get the number of miles. A 25-second delay means the lightning is five miles away. But here’s an even simpler technique — if you can hear thunder, get inside.

And that old advice your mom or your teacher gave you that if you’re outside in a thunderstorm, get down as close to the ground as you can? Sorry, Mom and Mrs. Lewis, that goes in the same folder with feed a cold, starve a fever, and if you make a silly face, it’ll stay that way.

I think that’s it. This week’s flash/boom wasn’t much, but we’ll take what we can get. It wasn’t Miami, but it wasn’t bad. Boom. Flash. Kaboom. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected] .