Quote Originally Posted by TFOGGER View Post
Actually, lighting rods are designed to attract and direct strikes so as to prevent damage (by providing a clear path to ground). A company here in Colorado designs and implements "dissipation arrays" that are designed to disperse and discharge atmospheric charge buildups BEFORE there is enough energy potential to initiate a lightning strike. The company is LEC, and their arrays are in use at the majority of refineries and oil storage facilities world wide. One of my good friends worked for them as an engineer several years ago.
I'm not inclined to enter a lengthy debate on this, but I'd submit that a "dissipation array" is made up of an array of lightning rods... it's all in how they're deployed for a particular environment... each rod can only dissipate so much energy, only for a cone of area, and only to devices that they are electrically copuled... by making an array, you create an area that's protected...

if you size/configure the lightning rod in such a way that it can't dissipate the energy fast enough to prevent a strike, then it will certainly attract it, and your conductors to ground will have to be orders of magnitude larger to carry the extreme currents present in a lightning event without damage.