NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS SR-193

LIGHTNING FATALITIES, INJURIES, AND DAMAGE REPORTS
IN THE UNITED STATES FROM 1959-1994

E. Brian Curran
National Weather Service Forecast Office
Fort Worth, TX

Ronald L. Holle
Raúl E. López
National Severe Storms Laboratory
Norman, OK

Scientific Services Division
Southern Region Fort Worth, TX

October 1997

ABSTRACT

Lightning-related fatality, injury, and damage reports in the US were summarized for 36 years since 1959, based on the NOAA publication Storm Data. There were 3239 deaths, 9818 injuries, and 19,814 property-damage reports from lightning during this period. The number of lightning-caused casualty and damage events was less variable from year to year than other weather causes. For this reason, lightning is the most constant and widespread threat to people and property during the thunderstorm season.

By state, Florida led the nation in the actual number of deaths and injuries, while the largest number of damage reports came from Pennsylvania. There were large variations among decades in casualties and damages. When population was taken into account, New Mexico (all decades) and Wyoming (mainly in the 1960s and 1970s) led the nation in death, injury, and casualty rates. High casualty rates tended to be in Florida, the Rocky Mountains, plains, southeast, and New England. The highest rates of population-weighted damage reports were on the plains.

By month, all types of lightning reports in Storm Data reached maxima during July. Damage reports were spread more evenly through the year than were casualties. Casualties and damages in northern regions of the US had narrower distributions centered on summer than southern regions.

Within the day, two-thirds of the casualties occurred between noon and 6 p.m. There were relatively frequent damage reports during the night in the plains and midwest states. In winter, the afternoon peak disappeared for damage reports and was weak for casualties. Casualties were most frequent on Sunday, the next most common day was Saturday, then Wednesday. Damage reports were most frequent on Monday, then decreased on nearly every day until reaching the lowest number on Saturday.

Most incidents involved one person. For incidents involving deaths only, 91% of the cases had one fatality, while another 8% of the events had two people killed in the same incident. For incidents involving injuries only, 68% of the cases had one injury; casualties clustered nearly the same as injuries. Males were killed by lightning 5.6 times as often as females, and were 4.9 times as likely to be injured as females.

The digital Storm Data listing of the locations of victims is not very precise. Of the known locations, recreation was the largest category in every region and in the US. The next largest group involved people located under trees, and the next was related to the proximity to bodies of water. The remaining categories involving small numbers of people were golfers, people involved in agricultural activities, telephones users, and people in proximity to radios and antennas.

Half of all lightning-caused damage costs were between $5,000 and $50,000 according to Storm Data. Comparison with other datasets shows that Storm Data entries tend to include more expensive widely-known events and to exclude most of the small losses.

1. INTRODUCTION

This report summarizes casualties and damages from lightning in the United States. The information comes entirely from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publication Storm Data. Features of the national distribution of lightning-caused casualties have been summarized in a variety of ways in previous publications that will be referenced in this paper. These studies include Zegel (1967), Weigel (1976), Mogil et al. (1977), Vigansky (1985), Duclos and Sanderson (1990), Duclos et al. (1990), and L�pez and Holle (1995, 1996). Studies have also been made of lightning casualties and damages in Michigan (Ferrett and Ojala, 1992), central Florida (Holle et al., 1992), Colorado (L�pez et al., 1995), and Rocky Mountain states (Holle et al., 1996).

Short summaries of weather impacts based on Storm Data have been published each year since 1990 by the Office of Meteorology in NOAA's National Weather Service. From the 1992 to 1994 summaries, Table 1 shows the average number of deaths in the United States due to four categories of thunderstorm-related weather events. During this three-year period, lightning caused 44% of the fatalities, 19% of the injuries, and 3% of the damages for all convective-weather reports in Storm Data. Absolute values of these numbers must be considered with caution, for reasons given in the next chapter.

When all types of weather-related casualties are examined, Table 2 shows that lightning remains near the top of the list; only flash floods and river floods combined rank higher than lightning in terms of deaths. There is a substantial number of lightning victims and damages every year. Lightning entries have the least year-to-year variability of all convective-weather causes in Table 1, and less variability than nearly all other phenomena in Table 2. The result is that the vulnerability to lightning is a constant and widespread threat to people and property during every thunderstorm season. A somewhat similar study by Dittmann (1994) used Storm Data to examine state-by-state flood deaths from 1959-1991.

The need for the current study and other recent examinations of lightning victims was emphasized by Emanuel et al. (1995) who stated: "We believe that it is time to perform an analysis of the type of electrical storms that kill people" (page 1201).

It should be mentioned that a renewed interest in medical issues concerning lightning casualties has occurred. Recent publications on lightning-related deaths and injuries include a book by Andrews et al. (1992), two 1995 issues of Seminars in Neurology, and numerous articles such as those by Cherington (1995), Cooper (1995), and Cooper and Andrews (1995).