The Truth Behind ‘Miami”s ‘Bolt From The Blue’

Last week’s episode of CSI: Miami, “Bolt Action”, featured a weather phenomenon known as a “bolt from the blue”. Such lightning strikes are real, but the show’s treatment included several inaccuracies. (Episode spoilers after the jump.)

Meteorology expert Jesse Ferrell concentrated on the weather aspects of the episode. “I’m not Mythbusters so I don’t want to get into questions like whether the wire would have been able to electrocute the players sufficiently to kill them,” he explained. Instead, he described the “bolt from the blue” phenomenon itself.

Jesse Cardoza (Eddie Cibrian) stated in the episode that lightning can strike from a clear sky and travel 30 miles. “I’m glad that they are promoting the idea that you can be killed far outside of a thunderstorm,” Ferrell said. “‘Bolts From The Blue’ as they are called are a serious problem and I have blogged about situations where people were killed from them both in Miami and on a beach from an offshore thunderstorm like the one depicted in this episode. Depending on who you ask, the number is sometimes lower than 30, rarely higher.”

“I was happy that they mentioned something as geeky as Fulgurites,” he continued, referring to tubes of glass that are formed when lightning strikes sand. “The show insinuated that fulgurites form around wires, when in reality they form in plain sand or dirt as the lightning travels through it – I’m not sure if they would form around a wire or not but the flashback slo-mo animation of the fulgurite is pretty darn cool, I’ve never seen that visualized before but it seems reasonable.”

Speaking of the special effects, Ferrell was moderately pleased with the lightning created for the episode. “It’s nearly impossible to mimick lightning in effects that would satisfy any meteorologist and the depiction was acceptable,” he shared. “What wasn’t acceptable, unfortunately, was the tiny cumulus cloud that the lightning came from. ‘Bolts From the Blue’ would be coming from large, highly developed thunderstorms and in my opinion the small cloud shown couldn’t have produced lightning at all. It shouldn’t have been hard to find a stock photo of a decent thunderstorm.”

The comment that Miami experiences the highest rate of lightning strikes in the country was not entirely accurate, Ferrell revealed. “Florida’s ‘lightning alley’ is considered to run from Tampa to Orlando across the center of the state,” he said. “Overall though, most of Florida experiences the highest rates in the country.”

The lightning would have immediately knocked the volleyball players down, bolts do not always strike the highest point, and the “bolt from the blue” phenomenon is so rare that the conditions necessary to pull off the murder in the episode would require a lightning strike with odds of “probably a million or more to one”. However, that was not the biggest error Ferrell saw in the episode. “The biggest inaccuracy is that the lightning made no sound when it struck,” he said. “Regardless of where the lightning came from, the thunder that you hear is loud when it strikes close because it is striking close. It looked like to me that the lifeguard stand was 100 feet away at best – at this distance the thunder would have been so loud that it would have certainly been heard in the scene, probably causing people to jump in unison or be knocked off their feet.”