Needed an iPhone

Tonight was the kickoff of high school football.  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 onto the field.  In Ohio this means a mandatory thirty minute wait before the game can continue.  Each time there was lightning in the sky, the half-hour clock restarted.  At home I would have checked the local radar to see what was coming.  I had my cell phone.  I decided to call someone that I knew had access to the Internet.

I had to make a couple of calls before I found someone who wasn’t at a football game.  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.  This one was going to be nasty.  The weather service said it would include heavy rain and hail.

The referees have a box in the press box.  Any time there is a lightning strike within fifteen miles, an alarm goes off.  They didn’t have access to anything else.  They thought the storm was almost over, so they continued the game.  We left.

Within half an hour it hit.   I talked on the phone with some people that stayed behind.  It was an ugly scene.  No one was struck by lightning (thankfully), but there were some injuries on the field stemming from the sudden change in field condition.

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.  I will watch the news tomorrow to see how things ended.