Thirty Seconds and Thirty Minutes
A summit Mass for 1,400 pilgrims, a thunderstorm 14 kilometres off and closing at 30 kilometres an hour, and a path that takes fifty minutes to walk down. The steward's assistant counts seconds between flash and bang, will not promise any place is safe, and helps the stewards sort who goes where. The story is about three seconds to the kilometre, a rule written in April, and not knowing whether the day needed it.
The pilgrimage up Cnoc Bhríde had been made on the last Sunday of July for as long as the parish had kept a register, and the register had not been kept carefully in the first few hundred years. There was a path of 2.1 kilometres, a climb of 330 metres, a stone chapel at the top the size of a large kitchen, and a Mass at three in the afternoon, which the older people still called "the hour of the pilgrims" and the young stewards called "the crush."
In 2048 there were 1,400 people on the hill. Nuala Boyle had counted them herself at the foot with a clicker, because she did not trust anyone else's count of anything.
Nuala was seventy-one and had been an electrician for forty-four years. She had also been, since 2041, the chief steward, a job that began as a favour to Father Colm and had grown to include radios, first aid, a car park, a sheepdog, and the tablet that rode in the pocket of her yellow coat. The tablet's assistant was called Cloch, which is the Irish for a stone. The diocese had issued it. Nuala had chosen the name, on the grounds that she would believe a stone sooner than a cloud.
"Forecast?" she said, at the foot, at half past nine.
"Fine until the afternoon," Cloch said. "Twenty-one degrees at the car park. The forecast model gives about a 30 per cent chance of thunderstorms somewhere in the northwest between one and six o'clock. That is not a prediction for the hill. It is a prediction for a few thousand square kilometres. I have the strike detector feed from the national network open and I will tell you the moment it shows anything within 40 kilometres."
"Good," Nuala said, and clicked once more for a woman with a pram, and went up.
What was true in 2026, when this story was written, is mostly old and plain.
Light reaches you at once. Sound travels at about 343 metres a second in air at 20 degrees, a little less in cooler air, which is about three seconds for every kilometre. Count the seconds from the flash to the bang, divide by three, and you have the distance to that stroke in kilometres. Thirty seconds is about ten kilometres. That is where the old "30-30 rule" in the United States gets its first number: if the gap is thirty seconds or less, go inside. The second number says wait thirty minutes after the last thunder before coming out. Both are still the guidance of the national weather services, usually shortened to "when thunder roars, go indoors."
The reason the first number is not larger is that lightning does not stay under its storm. A stroke can reach ten kilometres or more from the core, sometimes out of a sky that looks blue overhead. There is no safe distance in that sense, only a distance at which the odds are low enough and the time to move is long enough that the rule is worth following.
A building is not safe because it is a building. A building with a lightning protection system, a rod or a mesh, a down-conductor and a good earth, gives the current a road around the people inside. A small stone chapel with no protection can be struck and can pass current through its wet walls, its plumbing and its wiring. People inside a protected building are still told to stay off the walls, away from metal and out of any water. A car with a metal roof is a better shelter than a field because the current passes through the body of the car, around the people, not because of the tyres. Crouching in the open has been taught and taught again, and national guidance now says it does not make an exposed person safe.
Detectors exist and are useful. Commercial and national networks locate most cloud-to-ground strokes and put them on a map to within a few kilometres, which is good enough to see a storm coming and not good enough to say where the next stroke will land. The story gives its detector those limits and no more.
Deaths from lightning are rare, a few a year in the whole of Britain and Ireland. The rule is not written for the average year. It is written for the crowd on one hill on one afternoon, where the expected number is small and the possible number is not.
The summit crowd had thickened by two. There were about seven hundred on the ridge by the chapel, with rugs and flasks, waiting for three o'clock. Six hundred were on the path, going up or coming down. A hundred were at the foot. The sky was high and hazy. At ten past two Declan Gallagher, who was nineteen and in charge of the first-aid post on the ridge, put his head into the chapel doorway where Nuala was doing the roster.
"Thunder," he said. "Away to the west. Not much."
Nuala looked at her watch. "How long?"
"I didn't count."
"Count the next."
At 14:10 the next flash came, a pale scribble low over the sea. Nuala counted, and so did Cloch. "Forty-one seconds," the tablet said. "That is about 14 kilometres. The detector shows a line of cells about 25 kilometres long and the nearest strokes are at about that range, west-south-west. I do not have a speed from one reading."
"I'm not putting a hill into a panic on one reading," Nuala said.
"No. Nor would I. I want the second reading before I say anything that moves people."
It came at 14:20. Twenty-seven seconds. "About nine kilometres," Cloch said. "It was 14 ten minutes ago, so it has come 5 kilometres in ten, which is 30 kilometres an hour. If it holds that speed and that line it is overhead in about eighteen minutes, at about 14:38. It may not hold either. Storm cells speed up, slow down and change direction. It may pass to the north and give you thunder and a wet hill. It may not."
"Is it inside the rule?"
"It is inside the rule. Twenty-seven seconds is under thirty. The rule you wrote in April says that at thirty seconds we begin to move people. We are past that by about three seconds."
Nuala said something short in Irish. Then she took out her radio.
The rule she had written in April had taken one evening in the parish hall with a flask of tea, six stewards, Father Colm, and Cloch with a table on the wall. It had no clever parts. It listed what the hill had, in numbers.
The chapel, seven metres by five, would hold about a hundred standing and a few more sitting on the floor. It had a lightning rod on the gable, a copper strip down the north wall and an earth rod in the ground. Nuala had tested the earth herself on a dry day that month and it had read nine ohms, inside the ten that she had been trained to accept, and she had written it on a card inside the door. The sheepfold, a stone barn with a slate roof 0.9 kilometres down the path, would hold about two hundred. It had no rod. Cloch had said that a rodless barn on a hillside was better than a field and worse than a chapel with a conductor, and that it could not put a number on the difference. There were two minibuses and the mountain rescue Land Rover in the lower car park, which could be driven up the farm track to the foot of the last climb, sixteen seats, sixteen seats and five. Thirty-seven in all.
And there was the walk. On the pilgrimage of 2046 Nuala had timed the descent with a stopwatch at the hundredth steward's elbow. The fastest took thirty minutes, the median fifty and the slowest, who were not slow so much as old and careful, eighty. The barn was 0.9 of the 2.1 kilometres. From the ridge it was twenty minutes for the median walker and about thirty-five for the slow ones.
"It is a plain sum," Cloch had said, in April. "If the storm is eighteen minutes away, most of the people on the ridge can reach the barn and some cannot. If I was told only the speed and the distance I would send everyone down. But there are people for whom the walk is the danger. A person who falls on wet scree is as hurt as one who is struck. I would not like us to write a rule that sends the frail down a hill at a run."
So they had written three lists, and Father Colm had made them add a fourth.
"This is Nuala. All stewards. Plan B, as written. Repeat, plan B."
She said the rest into the radio and to the people around her, and Cloch read it over her words, in a flat voice for the stewards' earpieces:
People on the path above the barn: go down to the barn. People on the path below the barn: continue to the foot, to the cars. People in the foot area: into your cars, doors shut, and do not stand under trees. People on the ridge who can walk down in thirty-five minutes: go now. People who cannot, with their carers: into the chapel. Children under eight, with one adult each: the chapel. And the last list, the one that Father Colm had made them write: whoever is left over, to the vehicles.
It took the next ten minutes and was not tidy. There were seven hundred people on the ridge, and a chapel that held a hundred and a few. Declan counted the doorway with his clicker and stopped it at a hundred and four. "Full," he said. Inside, the frail sat in the middle of the floor on rugs, on the side away from the walls, with their sticks laid on the ground and their rosaries in their laps. The woman by the south wall who had arrived with a metal walking frame was moved to the centre and her frame to the porch, and she said very politely that she would have preferred not to be told where to put her own legs.
The vehicles came up the track in a line, two minibuses and the Land Rover, and took thirty-seven. A man of eighty, who had not wanted to be carried, was carried. His daughter said he could say what he liked afterwards.
"Thunder," said a voice on the radio at 14:28. "Twenty-one seconds."
"Seven kilometres," Cloch said. "About fourteen minutes at the same speed. The ridge is down to about two hundred. The path below it is full of people. Nuala, I have one thing to say that may not help. The people on the open path will be exposed for part of the time that the storm is here, whatever we do. We have chosen who is exposed and for how long. I cannot make that nothing."
"I know," said Nuala.
"I cannot tell you where the next stroke goes. I can tell you the networks I read, and I can tell you the arithmetic of the walk. I cannot tell you the storm's mind."
"I'd rather you didn't try."
Father Colm came out of the chapel at twenty to three with the stole round his neck and the ciborium in his hands, and went into the doorway where the crowd inside could see him. The three o'clock Mass was not going to happen on the ridge. He had known it since twenty past two. What he could do, and what he had done in the parish hall in April when the stewards had been uneasy about asking, was say that the Mass could be moved, and that the Church had never held a Mass to be worth the life of a pilgrim.
"We'll have the Mass later," he said to the people in the chapel, "in the barn, if the barn's dry, or here, if the Lord lets us. For now we pray. Psalm twenty-nine, if you know it." Many did. The voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory thunders. The voice of the Lord is powerful. It was an odd psalm to read to a frightened room. He read it plainly and he did not hurry, and when he got to the end, The Lord will bless his people with peace, there was a sound in the room that was not quite an Amen.
The cell reached the hill at 14:41, three minutes later than Cloch had said.
It did not arrive as a wall of cloud. It arrived as a change of light, the haze going slate and the ridge's lichen suddenly bright. The first rain came flat across the grass. Then, in the space of about twelve minutes, there were nine strokes within three kilometres by the detector's reckoning, and one that was not on any map. At 14:52 the chapel's gable took it. Those inside heard one sound, as a door slammed in the chest, and saw the light go white in the window. A boy of six, who was sitting on his grandmother's lap, was heard to say, "Was that God?" and his grandmother, who was ninety-one, said, "That was the rod, now hush," which Nuala later had put on the card inside the door.
Nobody inside was hurt. A woman by the porch said her hair stood on end before the flash, not after, and a lady with a pacemaker, whom Cloch had listed, was checked by Declan and found well. The mountain rescue Land Rover, with its five, lost its radio for ten minutes and nothing else.
The last thunder rolled away east at 15:48. "Thirty minutes from the last bang," Cloch said, "is 16:18. I would like to be sure that I am counting the last bang and not just the last one I heard. May we hold until 16:20?"
They held until 16:20.
The Mass was said in the barn at half past four, to about six hundred, and on the ridge at six to about three hundred who had stayed or come back, in a clean wind with the whole of the north Atlantic lit up below like a dish. Father Colm said the same Mass twice and was heard to say, in the sacristy, that it was the first time in thirty years he had said the Mass of the day twice and meant the first.
Nuala did her tally at the kitchen table in the parish house that evening, with Cloch open on the tablet. There had been 1,400 on the hill. About 140 had been in the chapel and the vehicles, 410 in the barn, and about 850 on the lower path, at the foot or in their cars, sixty of them on open ground at the time of the closest strokes, because the frail and the slow cannot be hurried. Nobody was hurt. One man had a sprained ankle from the scree. Eleven families had gone home before the Mass was said, most of them annoyed, and two of them had written a letter to the diocese.
"Did we need it?" she said. She said it flatly, as she asked everything. "Be honest."
"I can say what happened," Cloch said. "The cell came at about 30 kilometres an hour, as I estimated, and at about three minutes later than I said. It gave nine strokes within three kilometres of the ridge, and the chapel was struck at 14:52. If those 700 people had been on the ridge at 14:52 in the open, some would have been within a few hundred metres of a stroke on the ridge. I cannot say how many would have been hurt. I cannot give you a number, because I do not have a record of a hill like this one, and the record of the ones I do have is a few deaths in a few thousand crowds. I know that the rule said move at thirty seconds, and that you moved at twenty-seven."
"That's no answer."
"It is the only one I have. I can tell you that if the cell had passed ten kilometres to the north we would have walked 1,400 people to a barn for a wet afternoon and a late Mass, and that the rule would still have been right to say go. The rule is not a bet on this storm. It is a promise about the next one."
Nuala sat for a time with her tea. She was not a woman who sat. Then she took the card from her coat pocket, the one that said Earth: 9 ohms, tested 11 April, N.B., and she wrote under it, in the same pencil, the date and Struck 14:52. Held.
"Put it in the book for next year," she said. "Nine ohms. And a second rod on the north gable. And a count of how many the barn really holds."
"I have written it," said Cloch.
On the hill, above the car park and the cooling cars, the chapel stood with the evening on its stone and its small gable rod pointing at the sky like a finger, saying nothing, as it had been put there to do.