Thanks for the report as many do not see these reports from isolated news sources, I have been warning GC's and home owners including plumbers about this problem for a few years now, and I can not see a safe way to guard it from a direct lightning strike,

The problem starts with what this product is being connected too, most appliances that are connected to it will have flues and or chimney's that penetrate the roof line and in many cases can be the highest point above a roof, this is like you are just asking for lightning to strike it, second the understanding of how lightning current propagates through a conductive path is very little understood by many who are evaluating on how to protect this product, lightning has a high frequency component that just like in radio frequencies can follow paths that make no sense to the basic laymen who only understand DC or low frequency AC such as the power supply to our houses, simply bonding one end of the gas supply system is not enough, as the lightning current can and will flow do to the high frequency impedance of this bonding path, what I can't believe is that I can't find any info on where someone who knows more about lightning who that would be more qualified to develop a protection method for this product has been doing any testing, if there has been it has not been made very public, and this is the University Of Florida, with their knowledge from test preformed at camp Blanding, this would have been where they should have gone a long time ago. One of the reasons I feel this hasn't been done is that with my knowledge of lightning I think the proper protection of CSST with the added extra cost of the product would render it not a very good cost alternative to other known safer methods of gas piping, I would expect that not only would providing a protection system of the flues or chimneys that rise above the roof line have to be done, but parallel bonding at the appliance back to the electrode system would also have to be done to lower the impedance path for the lightning energy back to the GES to limit the amount of energy of the lightning placed on the product.