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Tonight was the kickoff of high school football.\u00a0 We made it through the first half without incident, but the clouds were rolling in during the band show.<\/p>\nTonight was the kickoff of high school football.\u00a0 We made it through the first half without incident, but the clouds were rolling in during the band show.<\/p>\n
The lightning started just as the players were getting ready to come back onto the field.\u00a0 In Ohio this means a mandatory thirty minute wait before the game can continue.\u00a0 Each time there was lightning in the sky, the half-hour clock restarted.\u00a0 At home I would have checked the local radar to see what was coming.\u00a0 I had my cell phone.\u00a0 I decided to call someone that I knew had access to the Internet.<\/p>\n
I had to make a couple of calls before I found someone who wasn’t at a football game.\u00a0 The radar showed we were on the south edge of a storm, but a bigger storm (two counties wide) was about fifty minutes behind the one over us.\u00a0 This one was going to be nasty.\u00a0 The weather service said it would include heavy rain and hail.<\/p>\n
The referees have a box in the press box.\u00a0 Any time there is a lightning strike within fifteen miles, an alarm goes off.\u00a0 They didn’t have access to anything else.\u00a0 They thought the storm was almost over, so they continued the game.\u00a0 We left.<\/p>\n
Within half an hour it hit.\u00a0\u00a0 I talked on the phone with some people that stayed behind.\u00a0 It was an ugly scene.\u00a0 No one was struck by lightning (thankfully), but there were some injuries on the field stemming from the sudden change in field condition.<\/p>\n
If someone in the crowd could have used an iPhone to check a radar map (and show it to the referees), we could have avoided this storm and all the fans and players could have been inside when it hit.\u00a0 I will watch the news tomorrow to see how things ended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tonight was the kickoff of high school football.\u00a0 We made it through the first half without incident, but the clouds were rolling in during the band show. The lightning started just as the players were getting ready to come back … Continue reading