Ham Op wrote:
"Physical damage is generally caused by direct strikes."

Lightning can produce awsome distruction from its millions of volts and
thousands of amps. Stories about it are informative, amusing, and
abundant.

Damage is mostly avoidable. High towers are nearly certain to be struck
repeatedly in passing thunderstotms. I`ve worked in medium wave
broadcasting, Short wave broadcasting, land-mobile radio, aircraft
radio, and microwave relay systems aplenty. I worked decades with a
worldwide corporation that had towers across the U.S.A. and several
other countries in the world. That corporation had its many towers
fitted with inverted Copperweld ground rods at the top to serve as
lightning rods to take most of the hits the towers received. At their
bottoms, the towers` lightning energy was shunted off to the earth
through ground rods driven into the soil around the towers. It worked.
There was no vaporized coax, tower lighting wires, or anything else.

We had to operate perpetually. We couldn`t pull the switch and throw the
coax out the window, even if someone were on hand to do so.

Evidence of lightnong strikes were the small pits it made in the
lightning rods.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI