• Average Lightning Stroke is 6 miles long.
• The Temperature of lightning's return stroke can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun is not even that hot! (around 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit).
• Average Thunderstorm is 6-10 miles wide.
• Average Thunderstorm travels at a rate of 25 miles per hour.
• Once the leading edge of a thunderstorm approaches to within 10 miles, you are at immediate risk due to the possibility of lightning strokes coming from overhanging anvil cloud. Because of this, many lightning deaths and injuries occur with clear skies directly overhead.
• On average, thunder can only be heard over a distance of 3-4 miles, depending on humidity, terrain and other factors.
• Approximately 100,000 thunderstorms occur in the United States each year. Approximately 10% of all thunderstorms are severe enough to produce high winds, flash floods, and tornadoes.
• Thunderstorms cause an average of 200 deaths and 700 injuries in the United States each year.

1. Stay indoors, and don't venture outside, unless absolutely necessary.
2. Stay away from open doors and windows, fireplaces, radiators, stoves, metal pipes, sinks, and plug-in electrical appliances.
3. Don't use plug-in electrical equipment like hair driers, electric toothbrushes, or electric razors during the storm.
4. Don't use the telephone during the storm. Lightning may strike telephone lines outside.
5. Don't take laundry off the clothesline.
6. Don't work on fences, telephone or power lines, pipelines, or structural steel fabrication.
7. Don't use metal objects like fishing rods and golf clubs. Golfers wearing cleated shoes are particularly good lightning rods.
8. Don't handle flammable materials in open containers.
9. Stop tractor work, especially when the tractor is pulling metal equipment, and dismount. Tractors and other implements in metallic contact with the ground are often struck by lightning.
10. Get out of the water and off small boats.
11. Stay in your automobile if you are traveling. Automobiles offer excellent lightning protection. There are exceptions to this, however, as seen here.
12. Seek shelter in buildings. If no buildings are available, your best protection is a cave, ditch, canyon, or under head-high clumps of trees in open forest glades.
13. When there is no shelter, avoid the highest object in the area. If only isolated trees are nearby, your best protection is to crouch in the open, keeping twice as far away from isolated trees as the trees are high.
14. Avoid hilltops, open spaces, wire fences, metal clotheslines, exposed sheds, and any electrically conductive elevated objects.
15. When you feel the electrical charge -- if your hair stands on end or your skin tingles -- lightning may be about to strike you. Drop to the ground immediately.