Anti-lightning tool will help keep cam on

A tool meant to repel lightning on the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier will protect the city’s popular fish cam.

The city is getting the $29,000 device installed to protect the city’s live, streaming view of the stingrays, turtles and other marine life that happen to swim by the pier. And it might save some lives too.

No one has yet been electrocuted on the pier, but lightning has fried the underwater view from one of the pier’s pylons three times since it was first installed in 2016, Deerfield Beach officials said.

The most recent strike to cause an outage was six weeks ago. City phones jangle from distant locations, such as Illinois and Wisconsin, asking when the view into the blue is coming back.

“The lightning suppression helps … keep this technology and make everyone safer,” said city spokeswoman Rebecca Medina Stewart.

No other pier in lightningprone Florida has tried a fish cam before, she said. “In a way, we are the guinea pig for this. It’s been a learning process for us,” she said.

A globe will be mounted on a pier light pole that will be the tallest point of the pier.

The main device is known as a capacitor, similar to the “flux capacitor” used for time travel in the movie “Back to the Future.” The globe draws in both negative and positive ions and directs them to the ground, so the area around it is protected.

The cost of new cameras for the pier and the manpower to re-install the equipment adds up quickly, Stewart said.

“This is actual real life,” said Brian Ward, vice president at EMP Solutions, which is installing the device Oct. 29. “It’s used at 8,000 locations worldwide in 30 countries.”