Contrary to what many people believe, lightning can and does strike people's homes. When it does, it can cause power surges, fires, and serious personal injury. Luckily, there are things that you can do to protect your house from lightning. If your home is struck, you should check to ensure everyone is alright and contact the fire department.

If you live where thunderstorms are common, you’ll want to protect your home from damage. Often, this means unplugging all electronics during a storm, having a plan in place in the event of a strike, and having reliable and

affordable homeowners insurance

To help you prepare,

Jerry

—the

licensed insurance broker

and home-care expert—has put together this comprehensive guide on how to get ready for thunderstorms and what to do if lightning strikes your house.

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Can lightning strike a house?

Yes, lightning can strike a house—and it often does! When violent storms roll in, your first instinct might be to get inside as quickly as possible. While this isn’t a bad idea since you are less likely to be injured by lightning inside your home, however statistically speaking, your house is far more likely to be struck by lightning than you are out on your own.

How much more likely? Well, standing out in the storm on your own, you’ve got about a 1 in 1,250,000 probability of being stuck, give or take. On the other hand, your house has a shockingly high probability—1 in 200,to be exact.That’s right—an average of 0.5%, or 700,000 of all homes in the nation, get struck by lightning each year.

What happens when lightning strikes a house?

The easiest way to understand lightning is to assume it’s alive with an agenda. Electricity from lightning wants to get from the cloud to a point deep in the earth—and it wants to do so as easily as possible. Any relatively tall object is a potential vector for lightning—especially if that object also runs deep underground. Lightning loves tall trees with deep roots or tall homes with power lines, basements, and pipes.

When lightning strikes a house, it travels along any vectors it can find, but it doesn’t simply spread out across all of these vectors unilaterally. Like water, lightning travels via the path of least resistance. So it’s more likely to run along conductive surfaces.

That said, it can steamroll through just about any type of household material, conductive or not. Lightning will continue running through your house until it finds the best path into the earth—which is usually through your pipes or your house’s main ground unit in your fuse box.

How does a lightning strike affect your house?

While lightning could arc off one of your pipes or the wiring in your room and electrocute you, it’s very unlikely. You’re far more likely to be injured in a house fire that starts as a result of the lightning. Or due to electrical shock from wiring that’s damaged—even then, personal injuries to individuals inside a struck house are rare.

The largest impact a lightning strike will have is likely to be property damage—but even that will often be far less extensive than you might think. As it travels, it will probably cause surge damage to your outlets and any electronics that are plugged in. However, since lightning follows the path of least resistance, the damage will usually be localized to the path the lightning followed.

As long as the strike doesn’t leave exposed electrical wires with live currents, you probably won’t end up with a house fire—but you should always take every precaution possible.

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What to do if lightning strikes your house?

If you’ve ever been close to a lightning bolt when it makes landfall, you’ll know how incredibly loud it is. So, after your home has been struck, you’ll no doubt be a bit disoriented. The light from the flash alone is enough to blind someone. However, even in post-strike chaos, remain calm and proceed carefully.

The first thing to do is check on everyone in the house. If anyone is injured, and it’s not something minor that you can help them with, you’ll need to call an ambulance.

Once you’ve called an ambulance and helped the injured person, call the fire department—if no one is injured, jump right to this step. The fire department will check for scattered fires in the attic, between your walls, and in other locations where lightning is likely to cause fires. They should also check for any exposed live wires.

Once the fire department gives you the all-clear, you should take detailed photo documentation of all damage—for the insurance claim later.

Once you’ve taken extensive photographs, call a building contractor and an electrician to assess any damage and give you a quote for the price of repairs. If you plan on submitting an insurance claim, this will help speed up the process.

How to protect your house from a lightning strike

It’s not possible to completely lightning-proof your house, but there are some things you can do to minimize the risk of being struck. If you’re concerned about a storm that’s rolling in, a good first step is to unplug any electronic devices. That way, there won’t be a direct line from the house's wiring to your expensive devices. Or, if you’d rather not rush to do that every time it storms, you can reduce the chances of significant damage to your devices by plugging them in via surge protectors—which you can get at any major retailer.

If you want to be extra cautious, you can pay for a professional lightning protection system—which is an elaborate grounding system. While effective, these systems are expensive. Since the odds of being struck by lightning is still relatively low, it’s not usually worth getting one unless you live somewhere with constant year-round storms like Florida.

MORE: What is a power surge?

Does homeowners insurance cover lightning strikes?

Lightning is one of the main

home insurance perils

that most policies cover.

That said, not all insurance companies cover all the damage lightning causes. For example, some companies may only cover damage occurring directly from the strike, like a fire, while others may cover any secondary damage, like a broken TV from a power surge.

Since policies and coverage vary, check your policy terms and contact your provider for more details.

How to save money on homeowners insurance

If, after checking your policy agreement, you see that you aren’t covered for lightning—or if you’d just like to save some money—consider downloading

Jerry

, the #1 rated insurance broker app. Using Jerry, you can quickly shop for homeowners insurance, compare prices from the best available deals, choose a policy, get your new coverage set up, and have your old policy canceled—all in just a few minutes! It’s the fastest and the simplest way to shop for and

switch home and auto insurance policies

“
Jerry
was wonderful! I used it for my auto and renters policies. I trusted it so much that I signed up my homeowners insurance under Jerry as well. All of the agents are amazingly nice and knowledgeable.” —Mary Y.

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