A. DEATH AND INJURY (CASUALTY) RATE PER POPULATION

States with the highest rates of lightning-
caused casualties per million people are shown
in Figure 11 and Table 13. Table 14 lists the
states with the lowest casualty rates.

There are major differences between these
rates and reported frequencies of casualties in
Figures 1 and 2, and Table 4. States are also
shown in descending order by number of
casualties per million people in Figure 12.

The highest rates of casualties were in
Wyoming and New Mexico, while these states
were only 35th and 21st, respectively, in actual
reports. These states are less populous than
most, but had many casualties. It must be noted
that in section 5 of this paper, Wyoming will be
shown to have had almost all of its casualties
in the 1960s and 1970s, and almost none since
then.

The only states in the first-ten list of both
casualties and casualty rate (Table 4) are
Florida, Colorado, and North Carolina.
Florida was first in all previous lists of
casualties, while it is third in casualty rate.
Colorado was tenth in reported casualties, and
fifth in casualty rate; North Carolina was
fourth and tenth in rate.

The net effect of taking into account the
population is a shift from the populous eastern
states to the Rocky Mountain and plains states.
Many of the southeast states have a high
ranking in both Figures 2 and 11.

The lowest casualty rates in Table 14
continue to be in nearly the same locations.
There is a dominance of west-coast states and
small eastern states in the list of reports in
Table 5 and casualty rate in Table 14.

Casualty rates for each state by population
over the US were also shown by Ferrett and
Ojala (1992) from 1959 to 1987, and Lépez and
Holle (1995) from 1959 to 1990. These studies
categorized results by increments of casualty
rates rather than the ranks in this report.
Lopez et al. (1995) showed casualty rates by
county in Colorado.

Data from the National Lightning
Detection Network can be used to take into
account both population and lightning activity.
For the US, a rate is found of 7.7 casualties per
million people per 100 million flashes.

TABLE 13. Ten US locations with the highest rates of
lightning-caused casualties (deaths and injuries
combined) per million people from 1959-1994. in

Storm Data.
Seana

Rank State Casualties/
million people/year
1 Wyoming 7.21
2 New Mexico 5.76
3 Florida 4.91
4 Arkansas 4.73
5 Colorado 4.28
6 Mississippi 3.47
7 Oklahoma 3.31
8 Maine 3.25
9 South Dakota 3.21
10 North Carolina 3.16

TABLE 14. As in Table 13 for lowest casualty rates.

Rank State Casualties/
million people/year
43 Illinois 0.91
44 Connecticut . 0.82
45 Nevada 0.76
46 New Jersey 0.71
47 Puerto Rico 0.44
48 Oregon 0.31
49 Washington 0.29
50 California 0.10
51 Hawaii 0.10
52 Alaska 0



6. MONTHLY AND SEASONAL VARIATIONS

Pci

A. NATIONAL BY MONTH

Lightning casualties and damages peak
during the summer months. July has the most
deaths, injuries, casualties and damage reports,
as shown in Figure 26 and Table 24. Monthly
percentages increase gradually through the
spring, when the thunderstorm season begins for
most of the country. Deaths, injuries, and
damages decline more rapidly in the fall
compared to the slower increase in spring.
Deaths occur earlier in the year somewhat
more often than injuries (Figure 26). The
Maryland aircraft crash in 1963 (mentioned in
section 5B) killed 81 people in December and
accounts for the large number of deaths in that
month.

Differences between the percentages of
casualties and damages are in the lower part of
Figure 26. Casualties reach a sharper max-
imum in July, while damage reports are spread
somewhat more evenly through the year.. The
more concentrated casualty distribution may
occur because people are exposed to lightning

AAA

more often during the midsummer months. In
contrast, immovable property and other objects
are damaged relatively more often before and
after the summer months. If this is true,
damage reports may be a better representation
of the distribution of cloud-to-ground flashes
than casualties.

For the US, all of the following papers
show a July maximum, as well as a slower
increase before that month compared to the
decrease after July:

* Storm Data deaths
(Zegel, 1967).

Storm Data deaths and injuries from 1968 to
1976 (Mogil et al., 1977).

* Storm Data casualties from 1968 to 1985

(Duclos and Sanderson, 1990).

* Storm Data casualties from 1959 to 1990

(Lépez and Holle, 1995).

*  Cloud-to-ground flashes from 1992 to 1995

(Orville and Silver, 1997).

from 1959 to 1965

30
4 Deaths
MH Injuries

& Damages

Percent

10

+
Ss

°

% casualties
minus damages

-4 L 1 n n n

FIGURE 26.

37

Top: Monthly variations of lightning fatalities, injuries, and damage reports for the US from 1959 to 1994.
Bottom: Percent casualties minus damage reports by month.


Casuaities Damages
1960s Wa 1960s,
sn
inee Eff
Rank jen
s 1-10 Ll
11-20 &
21-30 sv
031-52
ui] Casualties Damages
1970s a 1970s,

Casualties Damages
1980s 1980s.
H guia HH:
Bast :
Casualties Damages
ja: 1990s 1990s.
of 4
7 ae,
rt y

FIGURE 24. Decadal variations of lightning casualties and damages by state.

33


TABLE 26. Number of casualties and damage reports by season for all states, D. C., and Puerto Rico.

State Casualties Damage reports
Spring Summer Autumn Winter Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Alabama 39 234 15 7 56 197 23 il
Alaska 0 o 0 0 1 1 1 0
Arizona 10 114 38 2 4 70 9 1
Arkansas 83 245 20 7 149 297 102 28
California 15 39 22 3 4 18 21 7
Colorado 58 318 18 0 54 230 28 0
Connecticut 10 68 10 0 44 181 Al 3
Delaware 11 29 2 0 5 64 10 4
District of Columbia 11 11 1 0 3 ll 0 0
Florida 134 1090 286 13 55 314 64 17
Georgia 50 345 14 1 96 499 44 17
Hawaii 1 3 ie) 0 3 1 7 3
Idaho 9 72 6 0 22 241 40 2
Illinois 42 248 58 12 89 246 77 0
Indiana 43 181 14 0 82 234 32 2
Iowa 49 150 28 0 144 361 68 6
Kansas. 49 140 45 0 216 726 230 10
Kentucky 37 217 23 1 104 412 36 14
Louisiana 49 260 34 4 74 172 55 14
Maine 4 118 4 0 26 193 32 2
Maryland 41 114 14 81 79 341 31 4
Massachusetts 40 281 33 1 105 417 71 10
Michigan 62 606 64 o 139 557 114 4
Minnesota 21 123 25 0 95 256 54 1
Mississippi 42 228 21 5 68 105 20 12
Missouri 66 89 20 1 71 123 52 7
Montana 8 53 3 0 7 70 10 1
Nebraska 24 76 11 0o 129 399 83 7
Nevada 4 12 2 0 3 7 1 0
New Hampshire 2 72 2 0 29 155 18 4
New Jersey 9 154 22 0 10 82 2 4
New Mexico 36 198 15 0 8 39 1
New York 30 509 38 0 108 758 130 9
North Carolina 119 464 43 3 197 682 65 16
North Dakota 2 29 4 0 10 119 16 0
Ohio 111 347 87 0 86 295 29 2
Oklahoma 81 172 71 7 197 447 152 30
Oregon 5 12 9 0 123 14 4
Pennsylvania 32 540 64 8 182 1077 172 15
Puerto Rico 0 24 12 0 0 2 2 0
Rhode Island 2 39 6 2 25 72 20 5
South Carolina 36 238 32 0 116 533 62 6
South Dakota 10 60 9 0 49 334 53 1
Tennessee 107 318 46 2 178 501 73 12
Texas 149 231 114 4 239 284 135 31
Utah 16 82 18 0 19 70 17 1
Vermont 0 30 0 0 18 117 14 2
Virginia 30 194 11 0 77 347 43 0
Washington 5 33 1 1 7 37 10 2
West Virginia 8 97 3 0 27 109 8 2
Wisconsin. 31 190 18 2 60 332 107 10
Wyoming 7 89 8 id) 2 96 7 0
Total 1840 9586 1464 167 3590 13,369 2511 344

42


Injuries
1959-1994

105

ie

Injury rank
1959-1994

Rank

@ 1-10

BB 11-20
421-30
031-52

FiGuRE7. US map of lightning injuries ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

10



3000F

o
5
a Deaths

2000

Events

1000

Deaths per event

4000 F
Injuries

Events

ONTO ENMK OT OM KANO
Pepi tripoyr rr pyri

Injuries per event

5000 Casualties

3000

Events

1000

6 7 B 9 1011121314 151617181920 212223 2425 26 27 2829 30>30
Casualties per event

Fiure 36. Number of US lightning deaths, injuries, and casualties per event from 1959 to 1994.

52


8. DAY OF WEEK VARIATIONS

AAA a SN

The distributions of deaths, injuries,
casualties, and damage reports by day of week
are shown in Figure 35 and Table 29.

Only Sunday has significantly more deaths
than other days of the week. The Sunday total
is 24% more than the daily average. A slight
tendency for more deaths is also evident on
Wednesday.

Injuri

The largest numbers of injuries are om
Wednesday and the weekend days, and the
least are on Tuesday and Friday.

Casualties

Casualties are most frequent on Sunday,
then the next most common day is Saturday,
followed by Wednesday. This total of deaths
and injuries closely follows the injury curve, as
can be expected since there are three times as
many injuries as deaths.

Damage reports

Damage reports show the greatest
frequency on Monday, then they decrease on
nearly every day until reaching the lowest
number on Saturday.

More casualties on weekends suggest that
recreation is a factor on those days. In Florida
on the Fourth of July, 1996, 27 picnickers and
fireworks spectators were injured and one person
was killed (Paxton and Morales, 1997). An
unpublished study for Colorado by the authors
showed more recreational casualties on
weekend days and holidays than on weekdays,
while employment cases occurred more often on
non-holiday week days. This type of study
requires analysis of the verbal narratives in
Storm Data, and was not made for this US
dataset. The digitized Storm Data does not
contain information on the activity being
undertaken by people when they became
lightning victims. More damage reports on
weekdays is difficult to understand, but could
result from variations in reporting by
newspapers that do not publish every day.

50

LAA

TABLE 29. Day of week of lightning casualties and
damages in the US from 1959 to 1994.

Day Deaths Injuries Casualties Damages
Sunday 574 1502 2076 3411
Monday 445 1428 = 1873 3983
Tuesday 429 1258 1687 3709
Wednesday 473 1483-1956 3769
Thursday 428 1350 1778 3668
Friday 422 1261 = 1683 3262
Saturday 467 1534 2001 3163

Injuries

1400

1200

2000

1800

1600

Damages

3500

3000

Ficure 35. Day-of-week variations of US lightning
deaths, injuries, casualties, and damages from
1959 to 1994.


Findings from research with smaller
databases are difficult to intercompare since
each study has its own system. The following
are major features of some of this research:

* North Carolina medical examiner data
were used to develop two different systems
of locations. Lightning victims were most
often at their home or in the home’s
surroundings from 1972 to 1984 (Duclos and
Sanderson (1990). In contrast, another study
found that fatalities were most often in a
farm, field, or garden from 1972 to 1988
(Langley et al., 1991).

* Florida locations were summarized by
Duclos et al. (1990) and Holle et al. (1992).
As expected, a significant number of

lightning victims were in the vicinity of

water in some form.

* Lightning casualties during recreation have
increased since 1950 in Colorado, while
agricultural casualties have decreased
(Lopez et al., 1995).

* Outside the US, somewhat similar results
were found in Singapore (Pakiam et al.,
1981) and Australia (Coates et al., 1993).

It is important to go beyond the Storm Data
digital record for another reason. Not only is
location important, but the activity at the time
of the lightning casualty can tell more about
the lightning victim’s situation. Many or most
of the papers mentioned above also include or
link the victim’s activity to the location.

TABLE 34. Locations and numbers of lightning casualties in Storm Data including unknown cases (%).

Code —_ Location of ; United West N Ss N Ss Mid- North- South-
casualty States coast Rockies Rockies plains plains west east east
Under trees 13.7% 10.4 86 = 13.4 97 145 148 135 13.6
2 Water related, fishing, 8.1 61 12.5 5.5 4.0 9.6 5.3 74 10.4
boating, swimming, etc.
3 Golfing 3.9 12 43 46 42 2.2 6.2 3.1 3.6
4 Golfing and under trees 1.0 0.6 0 0.3 18 0.4 21 11 08
5 Driving tractors, farm 3.0 12 71 21 9.0 41 2.6 2.0 27
equipment, heavy road
equipment, etc.
6 Open field, ballparks, 268 19.0 365 405 206 304 27.1 206 262
playgrounds, etc.
Telephone-related 24 18 1.6 15 3.9 2.8 27 . 25
8 Radios, transmitters, 0.7 0 2.0 0.3 0.2 0.9 0.6 0.5 1.0
antennas, etc.
0,9 Not reported, at 40.4 595 27.5 317 467 35.2 386 50.2 39.2

various other and
unknown locations

56


13. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

ANA ANE

Lightning-related fatality, injury, and
damage reports for the United States 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.

Florida led the nation in the actual number
of deaths and injuries. Other states with high
numbers of casualties were in the south and
southeast, northeast, and southwest. The
largest number of damage reports came from
Pennsylvania. The states of Kansas,
Oklahoma, Nebraska, and South Carolina did
not rank as high in casualties as damages.
There were large variations among decades in
casualties and damages.

When population was taken into account,
Wyoming and New Mexico led the nation in
death, injury, and casualty rates. New Mexico
had high rates in all decades, but Wyoming’s
casualties were almost entirely from the 1960s
and 1970s. High casualty rates tended to be in
Florida, the Rocky Mountains, plains,
southeast, and New England. The highest rate
of damage reports was on the plains from North
Dakota to Oklahoma.

Population-weighted casualties decreased
until the 1990s, when the rate increased again.
The damage report rate also decreased until it
increased sharply in the 1990s. 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. -

All types of lightning reports in Storm
Data reached maxima during July. Casualties
reached a sharper maximum in July, while
damage reports were spread more evenly
through the year. Casualties and damages in
northern regions of the US had narrower
distributions centered on summer than southern
regions.

National Lightning Detection Network
data in recent years were used to estimate that
one lightning casualty occurred for every 86,000
flashes in the US.. A similar method results in
one death for every 345,000 flashes, and an

60

AAT

injury for every 114,000 flashes. A rate of 7.7
casualties per million people per 100 million
flashes was found for the US.

Two-thirds of the casualties occurred
between 1200 and 1600 LST.. Casualties showed
a steady increase toward a maximum at 1600
LST, followed by a somewhat quicker decrease.
Damage reports lagged casualties by two to
three hours.. They showed a steeper increase
toward a 1700 LST maximum than casualties, a
gradual decline toward midnight, then a slight
increase again after midnight. There were
relatively frequent damage reports during the
night in the plains and midwest states.

Summer casualties and damages closely
resembled the annual cycle. In spring and
autumn, the casualty maxima are less distinct
than for summer, and damages are spread more
uniformly through day and night. 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; such a result is consistent with
more outdoor recreational activities on the
weekend.. Damage reports were most frequent
on Monday, then decreased on nearly every day
until reaching the lowest number on Saturday;
this result could be due to newspapers that do
not publish every day.

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. Males were
killed by lightning 4.6 times as often as
females, and were 5.3 times as likely to be
injured as females.

Many of the Storm Data entries had
unknown or unreported locations for lightning
victims (40%).. Outdoor recreation was the next
largest category in every region and for the US.
The third largest group involved people
located under trees, and the fourth was related
to the proximity of victims to bodies of water.
Although it is sometimes thought that golfers
are frequent victims of lightning, they trail the
preceding groups in frequency. There were not
many lightning victims involved in
agricultural activities. Telephones were an


D. SEASONS

Diurnal variations of lightning reports are
subdivided by season in Figure 34 and Table 28.
Seasonal variations were shown earlier in
Figure 29, and Tables 25 and 26.

vil

Casualties in spring occur during the same
afternoon hours as for the entire year and
country in Figure 30. However, there is also a
secondary peak before noon.

Damage reports show a weaker diurnal
cycle than spring casualties in Figure 34, or all
damages for the year in Figure 30. An equal
number of reports occur from 1700 to 1900 LST,
several hours later than casualties.

ler
Casualties and damage reports during the
summer months closely follow the annual curves
in Figure 30, since they comprise more than half
of the year’s sample (Table 28).

Ai | 1, Novi

Casualties in autumn occur most often in a
broad afternoon maximum, but there is also a
secondary peak in the morning.

Damage reports are most common in late
afternoon, but are spread across the hours in a
similar manner to spring frequencies (Table 28).
Damages lag casualties by several hours.

Winter (Decem! Februar

Casualties in winter are erratic as shown by
the highest number (15) at 0900 LST. There is a
secondary peak during the more typical mid-
afternoon hours. The sample has only 63 cases.

Damage reports are spread across the entire
day and night and show no distinct maximum in
time.

In summary, maps of casualties and
damages during summer closely resemble the
annual cycle. Maxima in casualties usually
lead maxima in damages by two to three hours.
In spring and autumn, the casualty maxima are
less distinct than for summer, and damages are
spread more uniformly through day and night.
In winter, the afternoon peak is weak for
casualties and disappears for damage reports.

48

Casualties
Damages

——

--e--

20 + Spring 4

FicuRE 34. Time of day of lightning casualties and
damages by season in the US from 1959 to 1994
(%).


b 3 Rank of death rate
: 1959-1994

Rank
M@ 1-10
HB 11-20
2) 21-30
031-52

FiGure 13. US map of rates of lightning deaths ranked by state from 1959 to 1994,

20



Within the US, most of the following
papers show the same July peak and a slower
rise before July than the subsequent decrease:
-Florida, 1978 to 1987

Fatalities peaked in August (Duclos et al.,

1990).

-Michigan, 1959 to 1987
Storm Data deaths (Ferrett and Ojala,
1992).

-Central Florida, 1983 to 1990

Fatalities and property damages peaked in

August, while injuries were most common in

July (Holle et al., 1992).

-Colorado, 1950 to 1991

A few more casualties in July than June.

Casualties were more clustered during

midsummer in Colorado than for the US in

Figure 26 (Lépez et al., 1995).

-Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, 1987 to 1991

Slightly more insurance claims were made

in August than July (Holle et al., 1996).
-Florida, 1996

June and July had 65% of the cases (Paxton

and Morales, 1997).

Outside the United States, the following
two published monthly distributions show very
different results from the typical US monthly
distributions:

*Singapore, 1922 to 1979

Two maxima, in November and April, were

found in fatalities. Since this location is at

1°N, the midsummer concept is not relevant.

The annual cycle of deaths was identified

as similar to that of local thunderstorms

(Pakiam et al., 1981).

*Australia, 1824 to 1991

The largest number of fatalities are in

January, which had a slightly larger

number of deaths than in December.. Taking

into account the reversal of seasons in the

Southern Hemisphere, this is the same

result as found in the US. One difference

from the US data in Figure 26 is that the
buildup to midsummer is somewhat faster

than the dropoff (Coates et al., 1993).

TABLE 24. Monthly totals of number and percentage of annual total of deaths, injuries,
casualties, and damage reports due to lightning in the United States from 1959

through 1994,

Month Deaths injuries Casualties

Number % Number % Number % Number %
January 5 0.2 28 0.3 33 0.3 102 05
February 6 0.2 29 «03 35 0.3 150 08
March 40 1 158 2 198 2 425 2
April 97 3 288 3 385 3 996 5
May 347,11 “910 9 1257 10 2169 «11
June 69021 1970 20 2660 20 3935 20
July 934 29 2960 30 3894 30 5155. 26
August 68721 2345 24 3032 23 4280 22
September 281 9 869 9 1150 9 1755 9
October 51 2 202 «2 253 «2 514
November 16 05 45 0.5 61 05 242
December 85 3 4 01 99 0.8 92 0.5

3239 9818 13,057 19,815

38


1. INTRODUCTION

This report summarizes casualties and
damages from lightning in the United States.
The information comes entirely from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini-
stration (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 Lépez 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 (L6pez 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).

TABLE 1. Annual averages of casualties and property damage due to
convective weather (thunderstorms) during 1992-1994 (from National
Weather Service, Office of Meteorology). Order is by number of deaths

per year.
Convective Fatalities Injuries Damage
weather type ($millions)
Lightning 51 345 32
Tornadoes 47 1114 551
Thunderstorm wind 18 352 192
Hail 0 21 345



m—H Casuaties %—— X Damages

200 TNorthern xe _ Ae] 10° [Northern Midwest | 10°
Rockies’ ae Plains er %
/ a7
100 + 4 s00P 4a oF 4 800
od
ss.
0 9 1 400

1500

1000

500
4
400 TF outhern 1600 Feuthern -* 2400
Rockies
" 1200 Pains y 4
200 F 4 *~ <
Nee 1600
ee 800 F 4
«x
o— 4 4 400 -— 7 100
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 1980s 1970s 1980s 1990s

FIGURE 22. Decadal variations of number of reported lightning casualties (solid line with square) and
damages (dashed line with x) by region of the US.

=— 41 Casualties TM% —— % Damages

10 10 3
Northern Midwest
Pains err
57x 4 5F
Northern
o [Rockies
05
03 fF
0.4
5 5 t 5
Southern x Southern Southeast
Rockies SS Pains
N ’ r 44
3h 4 3PF Salita 4 4 *, 7
x b ~ 43
<L- >
1 1 L yu 1 1 1 n 1 rt,
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

FIGURE 23. Decadal variations of lightning casualties per million people per year (solid line with square) and
damages per million people per year (dashed line with x) by region of the US.

31


Rank of casualty rate

> 1959-1994
es ae 8
BS
,
Ah
At + Rank
ei vo i t-10
FA BB 11-20
se 21-30
31-52

FIGURE 11. US map of rates of lightning casualties (deaths and injuries combined) ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

17



D. DAMAGE REPORT RATE PER POPULATION

States with the highest rates of lightning-
caused damage reports are in Figure 15 and
Table 19. Table 20 lists states with lowest
damage rates. No previous publication has
shown US maps of damage reports normalized
by population.

A swath of high rates of damage reports is
located in Figure 15 from North Dakota to
Oklahoma and Arkansas. This region also had
high numbers of reported damages in Figure 8
with two exceptions. North Dakota. did not
have many actual reports, but this less
populous state became twelfth in terms of
damage rate. While Texas. had numerous
reports, its damage rate became small due to its
large population.. Other populous states in the
first ten in terms of numbers of reports (Table
10), New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan,
rank much lower in the rate of damage reports
(Table 19).

As noted in section 3D, there was usually
only one damage report for each. casualty in
southwestern states, Florida, and several
southeast states.. The northwest half of the US
tended to have about two damage reports for
each casualty. These unaccountable variations
by state result in the map of Figure 15 that does
not seem to have any pattern except for high
rates along the plains.

Lowest damage rates (Table 20) are mostly
from the same locations as states. with low
casualty rates in Table 14. A notable exception
is New Mexico, where there was a very low
rate of damage reports (41st) while it ranked
first or second in the rate of casualties, deaths,
and injuries.

23

TABLE'19, Ten US locations with the highest rates of
lightning-caused damage reports per million
people from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank - State Damage reports /
million people/ year
1 South Dakota 17.77
2 Kansas 14.17
3 Nebraska 11.36
4 Idaho 10.17
5 Vermont 8.79
6 Oklahoma 8.30
7 Arkansas 7.67
8 Wyoming 7.35
9 South Carolina 6.88
10 New Hampshire 6.78

TABLE 20. Ten US locations with the lowest rates of
lightning-caused damage reports per million
people from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Damage reports/

million people/year

43 Ilinois 1.04
AA Arizona 0.99
45 District of Columbia 0.56
46 Hawaii 0.45
A7 Nevada 0.44
48 Washington 0.41
49 New Jersey 0.38
50 Alaska 0.23
51 California 0.07
52 Puerto Rico 0.05



B. DEATH RATE PER POPULATION

States with highest rates of lightning-
caused fatalities are shown in Figure 13 and
Table 15. Table 16 lists states with the lowest
death rates.

New Mexico and Wyoming had the highest
lightning-caused death rates, as for casualty
rate in Table 13, except for exchanging first and
second places. Wyoming had a high death rate
in the first half of the record but not the last
half (section 5 of this paper), while New
Mexico consistently had high rankings.
Louisiana replaces Maine compared to casualty
rate results. Most states with highest death
rates are less populous than other states, or
have a medium number of people for a state.
The exception is Florida, where there is both a
large number of inhabitants and a high
lightning death rate. .

Lowest death rates (Table 16) were in
Alaska, Hawaii, and mainly Pacific-coast or
densely-populated east-coast states.. These
locations are often the same as states with a
small number of reported deaths in Table 7.

Similar maps of death rates per state
population based on Storm Data were shown by
Zegel (1967) from 1959 to 1965, by Duclos and
Sanderson (1990) from 1968 to 1985, as well as
by Ferrett and Ojala (1992) from 1959 to 1987,
These results were categorized by increments
rather than ranks. Mogil et al.. (1977) listed
the fatality rate by state in a table from 1968 to
1976.

The United States average was 0,41 deaths
per million people per year from 1959 through
1994. This value is more than two orders of
magnitude larger than the 0.01 deaths per
100,000 people per year determined for
Australia by Coates et al.. (1993) from 1980 to
1989.

19

TABLE 15. Ten US locations with the highest rates of
lightning-caused deaths per million people from
1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Deaths /
million people/year
1 New Mexico 1.88
2 Wyoming 1.47
3 Arkansas 146
4 Florida 1.10
5 Mississippi 1.04
6 Colorado 1.04
7 Oklahoma 0.88
8 North Carolina 0.84
9 Louisiana 0.83
10 South Dakota 0.81

TABLE 16. As in Table 15 for the lowest death rates.

Rank State Deaths/
million people/year
43 New York 0.20
44 District of Columbia 0.20
45 Connecticut 0.12
46 Rhode Island 0.12
47 Massachusetts 0.12
48 Oregon 0.08
49 California 0.03
50 Washington 0.02
51 Hawaii 0
52 Alaska 0



D. STATES BY DECADE

Another way to show changes through the
decades is to plot reported frequencies for each
state by decade, as shown in Figures 24 and 25,
and Tables 22 and 23. Before weighting by
population, casualties for the entire 36-year
period were shown by state in Figures 1, 2, and
3, and damage reports in Figures 8 and 9.
Decadal maps in Figure 24 and data in Table 22
for reported frequencies show the following:
Casualties
* Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are

always in the top ten.

* Highest numbers tend to be in the southeast

US and most populous eastern states.

* There is a shift towards the southwest US
with time.

* Most other states stay within one group of
ten from the previous decade.

Damage reports

* Pennsylvania is always in the top ten.

* Highest numbers tend to be in the plains
and most populous eastern states.

* States sometimes change by two groups of
ten from the previous decade.

¢ These variations in damage reports do not
necessarily represent actual changes in
damages. For example, Georgia increased

from 83 reports in the 1960s to 321 from 1990

to 1994, while Mississippi decreased from

58 in the 1960s to six reports in the 1990s.
¢ Table 22 shows more of these large

variations in damage reports.

32

After weighting by population, casualty
rates for the entire 36-year period were shown
by state in Figures 11 and 12, and the damage
rates in Figure 15. Decadal maps of the rates in
Figure 25 and data in Table 23 show:

Casualty rate

+ New Mexico and Arkansas are always in
the top ten.

* Highest casualty rates are most consistent
in the Rocky Mountain and southeastern
states.

* Wyoming drops from a very high rate in
the 1960s to a very low rate in the 1990s.

Damage rate
* Nebraska and Oklahoma are always in the
top ten.

* Highest rates tend to be in the northern
plains, southeast, and northeast states.
* Idaho maintains a high to very high rate
during all decades.
¢ However, as noted earlier, there are
variations in damage reports through time
that are not likely to represent actual
changes in damages, as shown in Table 23.
In summary, the decadal maps of numbers
and population-weighted rates of casualties
and damages show broad agreement with the
maps for the 36-year Storm Data record.
However, there are fairly large variations
among decades in casualties and their rates,
and very large variations in damages and their
rates.


TABLE 12. Lightning fatalities, injuries, and damage reports, and their ranks, for all states, the
District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico from 1959 to 1994.

State Fatalities Injuries Casualties Damage reports
No. Rank No. Rank No. Rank No. Rank

Alabama 84 16 211 17 295 18 287 28
Alaska 0 51 0 52 0 52 3 52
Arizona 59 24 105 29 164 30 84 43
Arkansas 110 9 245 13 355, 12 576 14
California 21 35 58 40 79 38 60 45
Colorado 95, 11 299 11 394 10 312 26
Connecticut 13 42 75, 35 88 36 269 29
Delaware 15 41 27 44 42 43 83 44
District of Columbia 5 48 18 48 23 49 14 48
Florida 345 1 1178 1 1523 1 450 19
Georgia 81 18 329 10 410 9 656 10
Hawaii 0 52 4 51 4 51 14 49
Idaho 20 37 67 38 87 37 305 27
Illinois 85 15 275 12 360 11 412 21
Indiana 74 22 164 24 238 23 350 24
Towa 65 23 162 25 227 26 579 13
Kansas 56 25 178 22 234 25 1182 2
Kentucky 82 17 196 19 278 19 566 15
Louisiana 116 6 231 15 347 14 315 25
Maine 22 34 104 30 126 31 253 30
Maryland 116 7 134 26 250 20 455 18
Massachusetts 24 33 331 9 355 13 603 12
Michigan 89 12 643 2 732 2 814 6
Minnesota 53 27 116 28 169 29 406 23
Mississippi 89 13 207 18 296 17 205 33
Missouri 79 20 97 31 176 28 253 31
Montana 20 38 44 42 64 41 88 42
Nebraska 41 30 70 36 111 33 618 il
Nevada 6 47 12 49 18 50 11 50
New Hampshire 8 45 68 37 76 40 206 32
New Jersey 55 26 130 27 185 27 98 41
New Mexico 81 19 68 23 249 21 54 47
New York 128 4 449 5 577 5 1005 3
North Carolina 165 2 464 4 629 4 960 4
North Dakota 11 44 24 45 35 46 145 37
Qhio 115 8 430 6 545 6 412 22
Oklahoma 88 14 243 14 331 15 826 5
Oregon 7 46 19 46 26 48 150 35
Pennsylvania 109 10 535 3 644 3 1441 1
Puerto Rico 30 32 6 50 36 45 4 51
Rhode Island 4 49 45 41 49 42 122 38
South Carolina 77 21 229 16 306 16 717 8
South Dakota 20 39 59 39 79 39 437 20
Tennessee 124 5 349 7 473 8 764 7
Texas 164 3 334 8 498 7 689 9
Utah 34 31 82 34 116 32 107 39
Vermont 12 43 18 47 30 47 151 34
Virginia 51 28 184 21 235 24 487 17
Washington 3 50 37 43 40 44 56 46
West Virginia 20 40 88 32 108 34 146 35
Wisconsin 47 29 194 20 241 22 509 16
Wyoming 21 36 83 © 33 104.35 105 40
United States 3239 9818 13,057 19,814

14


$50- $500-
500 5,000

$5,000- $50,000- $500,000-
50,000 500,000 5,000,000

FIGURE 41. Decadal changes in US lightning damage reports for the five most frequent cost categories.

TABLE 35. Costs of US lightning damage in Storm
Data from 1959-1994, including unknowns.

Damage Category Incidents % of total

$ 0- 50 143 0.7
50- 500 = 1017 51

500 - 5,000 4266 21.5
5,000- 50,000 9117 46.0
50,000- 500,000 3727 18.8
500,000- 5,000,000 176 0.9
5,000,000-50,000,000 17 01
Unknown 1352 68

The types of property damages in central
Florida from 1983 to 1990, but not the damage
amounts, were summarized by Holle et al.
(1992). The most frequent category was
residences, including mobile homes and
apartments; no other large category was found.
Michigan losses over $50,000 from 1959 to 1987
were mapped by Ferrett and Ojala (1992) by
county.

The digital database developed from
Storm Data contains 106 entries for 1989 that
are incorrectly coded. These amounts indicate
losses of more than $500 million, and were
recoded for the present study as missing.

TABLE 36. Distribution of the costs of material damage by region of the US, without unknowns.

Amount United West N

N Ss Mid- North- South-

States coast Rockies Rockies plains plains west east _east

$500-5,000 23.1 215 292
$5,000-50,000 494 416 45.8
$50,000-500,000 20.2 206 144

32.2 20.5 16.0 23.6 23.5
46.2 525 488 48.9 514
138 205 288 21.1 175



Florida
Michigan “A
Pennsylvania
North Carolina
New York |
Ohio
Texas
Tennessee
Georgia
Colorado
Minois
Arkansas
Massachusetts
Louisiana
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Mississippi
Alabama
Kentucky
Maryland
New Mexico
Wisconsin
Indiana
Virginia
Kansas
lowa
New Jersey
Missouri
Minnesota |
Arizona
Maine
Utah
Nebraska
West Virginia
Wyoming
Connecti cut
Idaho
Caifomia
South Dakota
New Hampshire
Montana
Rhode Island
Delaware wees
Washington :
Puerto Rico
North Dakota
Vermont
Oregon
D.C.
Nevada
Hawaii -
Alaska

1 n L ni n 1

8

500 750 1000 1250 1500
Casualties

FiGURE 3. Number of lightning casualties (deaths and injuries combined) ordered by state from 1959 to 1994.


B. NATIONAL BY DECADE

Time series by decade of reported
frequencies of casualties and damages for the
US are in Figure 19, and population-weighted
time series are in Figure 20. Entries for the
1990s were made comparable to other decades
by doubling the number of frequencies reported
from 1990 to 1994. There was one large event
due to an aircraft crash in 1963 (Maryland, 81
deaths).

Reported damage frequencies for the 1990s
in Figure 19 are greater than during previous
decades, while casualties are also somewhat
more than in recent decades. Since only the
first half of the 1990s has been included, it
remains to be seen whether these trends will
continue through the rest of the decade.

Population-weighted casualties by decade
in Figure 20 show a decrease until the 1990s,
when the rate increases again. The damage
report rate also was decreasing until it
increased sharply in the 1990s. Again, the
changes in trends are largest in the 1990s,
which includes 1990 to 1994 in this analysis.

29

7000

6000 F “4
,

5 Damages “

€ 5000p ee HL v 4

z * “> K
_ el
3000 : 1 1

1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

Ficurr 19. Number of reported US lightning casualties
and damage reports by decade.

3.0

x ca 4
25 ~. Damages Y

Sf
g ‘* 4
& 2.0-

15h 7

4.94 nm 1 L
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

s

FiGurE 20. Population-weighted US lightning casual-
ties and damage reports by decade.


TABLE 21. Average population, and rate/million people/year of lightning-caused fatalities, injuries, casualties
(fatalities and injuries combined), and damage reports for all states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico from
1959 to 1994. Population is average of decennial census values from 1960 to 1990.

State Average population Fatality rate Injuryrate_ Casualty rate Damage rate
[1000s] Rate Rank Rate Rank Rate Rank Rate Rank

Alabama 3,660 0.64 24 1.60 23 2.23 22 2.18 34
Alaska 369 i 52 0 52 0 52 0.23 50
Arizona 2,364 0.69 19 1.23 30 1.93 26 0.99 44
Arkansas 2,086 1.46 3 3.26 4 4.73 4 7.67 7
California 22,275 0.03 49 0.07 51 0.10 50 0.07 51
Colorado 2,536 1.04 6 3.24 5 4.28 5 3.42 21
Connecticut 2,990 0.12 45 0.70 42 0.82 44 2.50 29
Delaware 564 0.74 17 1.33 27 2.07 24 4.09 17
District of Columbia 691 0.20 44 089 37 092 41 056 © «45
Florida 8,605 1.10 4 3.80 3 4.91 3 1.45 40
Georgia 5,119 0.44 28 1.79 vA 2.23 23 3.56 19
Hawaii 869 9 51 0.10 49 0.10 51 0.45 46
Idaho 833 0.67 22 2.23 13 2.90 13 10.17 4
Illinois 11,011 0.21 42 0.69 43 0.91 43 1.04 43
Indiana 5,223 0.39 29 0.87 38 1.26 37 1.86 35
Towa 2,818 0.64 23 1.60 24 2.24 21 5.71 13
Kansas 2,317 0.67 20 2.13 15 2.80 14 14.17 2
Kentucky 3,401 0.67 21 1.63 21 2.30 20 4.62 16
Louisiana 3,830 0.83 9 1.65 19 2.48 17 2.28 32
Maine 1,078 0.57 25 2.68 6 3.25 8 6.52 11
Maryland 4,005 0.80 12 0.94 36 1.74 29 3.16 23
Massachusetts 5,648 0.12 47 1.63 22 1.75 28 2.97 25
Michigan 8,813 0.28 37 2.03 16 2.31 19 2.57 28
Minnesota 3,918 0.38 30 0.84 39 1.21 38 2.88 26
Mississippi 2,372 1.04 5 2.42 7 3.47 6 2.40 30
Missouri 4,758 0.46 27 0.54 44 1.00 40 1.48 38
Montana 739 0.75 18 1.65 20 2.41 18 3.31 22
Nebraska 1,511 0.75 16 1.27 28 2.02 25 11.36 3
Nevada 694 0.24 40 0.52 45 0.76 45 - 0.44 47
New Hampshire 844 0.26 38 2.24 12 2.50 16 6.78 10
New Jersey 7,082 0.22 41 0.49 46 O71 46 0.38 49
New Mexico 1,200 1.88 1 3.89 2 5.76 2 1.25 41
New York 17,642 0.20 43 0.71 41 0.91 42 1.58 37
North Carolina 5,535 0.84 8 2.32 10 3.16 10 4.82 15
North Dakota 635 0.48 26 1.05 34 1.53 31 6.34 12
Ohio 10,501 0.30 34 1.13 32 1.44 35 1.09 42
Oklahoma 2,764 0.88 7 2.42 8 3.31 7 8.30 6
Oregon 2,334 0.08 48 0.23 48 0.31 48 1.79 36
Pennsylvania 11,715 0.26 39 1.26 29 1.52 32 3.42 20
Puerto Rico 2,296 0.36 31 0.07 50 0.44 47 0.05 52
Rhode Island 939 0.12 46 1.33 25 1.45 34 3.61 18
South Carolina 2,895 0.78 13 2.22 14 2.99 12 6.88 9
South Dakota 683 0.81 10 2.40 9 3.21 9 17.77 1
Tennessee 4,240 0.81 11 2.29 11 3.09 11 5.01 14
Texas 12,998 0.35 32 0.71 40 1.06 39 1.47 39
Utah 1,283 0.74 18 1.78 18 2.51 15 2.32 31
Vermont 477 0.76 14 1.05 35 1.80 27 8.79 5
Virginia 5,037 0.28 36 1.06 33 1.35 36 2.69 27
Washington 3,815 0.02 50 0.27 47 0.29 49 0.41 48
West Virginia 1,837 0.30 33 1.33 26 1.63 30 2.21 33
Wisconsin 4,492 0.28 35 1.21 31 1.49 33 3.15 24
Wyoming 397 1.47 2 5.74 1 7.21 1 7.35 8
United States 216,738 0.41 1.26 1.67 2.54

26


2. LIGHTNING REPORT DATA
RRA SS

SS

Reports of damaging weather phenomena
are collected monthly by local NOAA-
National Weather Service offices. Individual
station reports are sent to NOAA’s National
Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville,
N.C. where Storm Data is assembled for the
entire country. This publication has been
compiled with essentially the same procedures
and agencies since 1959.

The database used in this study contains all
reports published in Storm Data. Each report
contains the following information:

Year, month, and day.

Time in Local Standard Time (LST).

State and county.

Number of fatalities.

Gender and location of fatalities.

Number of injuries.

Gender and location of injuries.

Categorical amount of damage reported.
The total number of lightning-caused
reports in the Storm Data archive during the 36
years is in Table 3. A total of 11 casualty or
property-damage reports were found to be
assigned to the wrong state in the digital
database by cross-checking them with the two-
letter state codes. The quality of the NCDC
database, defined as the ratio of incidents with
known time and date of occurrence to all
incidents, has improved from below 40% during
the 1960s to above 90% after 1987.

eoeecceeoe

TABLE 3. Total lightning-related reports in Storm Data
from 1959-1994.

Impacts Entries
Deaths 3,239
Injuries 9,818
Casualties

(deaths and injuries combined) 13,057
Property damage 19,814

AAS

Absolute values of the casualties and
especially damages in Tables 1 to 3 must be
considered with caution. Lightning-caused
casualty and damage events are usually less
spectacular and more widely dispersed in time
and space than are other weather phenomena
such as tornadoes and hurricanes. For this
reason, lightning deaths, injuries, and damages
are underreported, as found in the following
studies:

* Mogil et al. (1977) found 33% more
lightning deaths in. Texas than Storm Data.

* Lépez et al. (1993) found 28% more
fatalities and 42% more injuries requiring
hospitalization in Colorado than Storm
Data.

* Holle et al. (1996) found 367 times as many
insured personal property claims due to
lightning in three western states than were
listed during the same years in Storm Data.

* — Lushine (1996) found 31% more fatalities in
Florida than Storm Data.

The results of Holle et al..(1996) lead to the
conclusion that lightning-caused losses are
similar to, or exceed other phenomena in Table
1. When other unquantified losses are taken
into account, lightning may be the largest cause
of damages and have less change from year to
year than most other weather types.

Factors contributing to underreporting
include the following:
¢ Indirect lightning casualties are often

reported by the medical system as having

lightning as the secondary rather than the

primary cause (Mogil et al., 1977).

° Reliance on newspaper clipping services for
lightning events entered in Storm Data by
the National Weather Service (Lopez et
al., 1993).

¢ The typical lightning casualty usually
affects only one individual.

However, the only consistent source of data
on lightning deaths, injuries, and damages for
several recent decades has been Storm Data.
With the exception of 106 damage entries that
were miscoded in the year 1989 (Section 12), the
Storm Data information will be used in the
present report without modification.


TABLE 2. Summary of 1994 weather casualties, and 30-year
normals (from National Weather Service, Office of
Meteorology). Order is by 30-year death rate, then by

1994 deaths.
Weather 1994 1994 Deaths
type deaths injuries per year
Flash flood 59 33
}139
River flood 32 14
Lightning 69 484 87
Tornado 69 1067 82
Hurricane 9 45 27
Extreme temperatures 81 298
Winter weather 31 2690
Thunderstorm wind 17 315
Other high wind 2 61
Fog 3 9
Other 6 59
Total 388 5,165



4. VARIATIONS BY STATE WEIGHTED BY POPULATION

AA

Section 3 showed results when actual
frequencies of Storm Data entries were used.
Many states with high frequencies of casualties
and damage are the most populous, such as New
York and other northeast states. However,
some states suchas Colorado and New Mexico
are not so populous but also had large numbers
of lightning-caused deaths and/or injuries.

eS

To compensate for this effect, population
was considered. Figure 10 shows the ranks by
state of the population during the Storm Data
record. These values were found by averaging
the decennial census populations in 1960, 1970,
1980, and 1990.. The average populations were
then used to calculate rates of casualties,
deaths, injuries and damages for each state.

é

¥ 7 Population rank
ae 1959-1994
A
ney, HH
ZF Rank
¢ Gy 1-10
Hee HH Bi 11-20
ad 221-30
031-52

FIGURE 10. US map of average population ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

15


wi 40 64 Casualties
— AR 1959-1994
? 87

79 18 116

FIGURE 1. US map of number of lightning casualties (deaths and injuries combined) by state from 1959 to 1994.

wi Casualty rank
1959-1994

Rank

1-10

eres 7 BB 11-20
~ (421-30
31-52

FIGURE2. US map of lightning casualties (deaths and injuries combined) ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.


C. INJURY RATE PER POPULATION

States with highest rates of lightning-
caused injuries are in Figure 14 and Table 17.
Table 18 lists states with. the lowest injury
rates.

Locations with the highest rates of injuries
(Table 17) are almost identical with those
with high casualty rates in Table 13. The list
is almost entirely different from reported
injuries in Table 8; Florida and North Carolina
are the only states in both tables. States with
high injury rates have smaller than average to
average populations, while the. largest
reported frequencies of injuries are from
populous states.

Lowest injury rates (Table 18) are from
similar locations as low casualty rates in Table
14 - Alaska, Hawaii, west coast states, and
small east coast states. The one exception is
Missouri, where less injuries than deaths have
been reported (Table 12); nearly all other states
have more injuries than deaths as summarized
in section 3C.

Ferrett and Ojala (1992) showed similar
injury rates per population from 1959-1987
based on Storm Data. Their results were in
increments rather than ranks.

21

TABLE 17.. Ten US locations with the highest rates of
lightning-caused injuries per million people from
4959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Injuries/
million people/year
1 Wyoming 5.74
2 New Mexico 3.89
3 Florida 3.80
4 Arkansas 3.26
5 Colorado 3.24
6 Maine 2.68
7 Mississippi 2.42
8 Oklahoma 2.42
9 South Dakota 2.40
10 North Carolina 2.32

TABLE 18. As in Table 17 for lowest injury rates.

Rank State Injuries/
million people/year
43 Hlinois 0.69
44 Missouri 0.54
45. Nevada 0.52
46 New Jersey 0.49.
47 Washington 0.27
48 Oregon 0.23
49 Hawaii 0.10
50 Puerto Rico 0.07
51 California 0.07
52 Alaska 0



NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS SR-193

LIGHTNING FATALITIES, INJURIES AND DAMAGE REPORTS

IN THE UNITED STATES, 1959 -1994

E. Brian Curran
NWSFO Fort Worth, TX

Ronald L. Holle

Ratil E. Lépez

National Severe Storms Laboratory
Norman, OK

Scientific Services Division
Southern Region
Fort Worth, TX

October 1997

UNITED STATES National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE James Baker Robert Winokur
William M. Daley, Secretary Under Secretary and Administrator Acting Assistant Administrator


Maximum lightning impacts during the
afternoon have been widely documented.. For a
small dataset from 1968 to 1985, deaths in
North Carolina peaked at 1800 LST (Duclos
and Sanderson, 1990). However, the most
common maxima are from 1400 to 1600 LST:

* Deaths in Singapore from 1922 to 1979
(Pakiam et al., 1981).

¢ Deaths in Florida from 1978 to 1987 (Duclos
et al., 1990).

* Deaths, injuries, and damage reports in
Michigan from 1959 to 1987 (Ferrett and
Ojala, 1992).

* Casualties in the US from 1959 to 1990

(Lépez and Holle, 1995).
¢ Casualties in Florida during 1996 (Paxton

and Morales, 1997).

On the time scale of individual storms,
Holle et al. (1992) studied summer storms in
central Florida. People had a tendency to be a
casualty of lightning more often toward the
start and end of thunderstorms, while objects on
the ground were struck more uniformly through
the lifetime of a storm. As onthe daily scale,
immobile objects were less sensitive to the storm
than people who took actions against the
threat.

TABLE 27. Time of day of numbers and percentages of deaths, injuries, and damage reports due to
lightning in the United States from 1959 through 1994. LST is Local Standard Time.

Deatt Iniuri Casualti

Damage reports

Cases % Cases % Cases % Cases %
0000-0059 LST 9 04 18 0.3 27 0.3 267 2.2
0100-0159 10 0.5 33 0.5 43 0.5 394 3.3
0200-0259 15 0.7 23 0.4 38 04 330 2.8
0300-0359 7 0.3 u 0.2 18 0.2 291 24
0400-0459 14 0.7 2 03 36 0.4 245 2.0
0500-0559 7 0.3 27 04 34 04 227 1.9
0600-0659 17 0.8 34 0.5 51 0.6 224 19
0700-0759 29 14 99 15 128 15 181 15
0800-0859 30 14 108 16 138 16 196 16
0900-0959 44 2.1 99 15 143 17 185 15
1000-1059 63 3.0 257 3.9 320 3,7 210 18
1100-1159 5A 2.6 254 3.8 308 3.6 222 18
1200-1259 140 68 444 6.7 584 6.7 333 28
1300-1359 192 9.3 600 91 792 91 B41
1400-1459 270 = 13.0 829° 12.5 1099 12.7 841 7.0
1500-1559 296 14.3 854, 12.9 1150) 13.2 1024 8.5
1600-1659 263 12.7 702 10.6 965 11.1 1153 9.6
1700-1759 2360114 740 (11.2 976 «11.2 = 1061 88
1800-1859 158 76 589 8.9 747 8.6 973 8.1
1900-1959 85 41 312 47 397 4.6 8337.0
2000-2059 51 25 244 3.7 295 34 755 6.3
2100-2159 38 18 182 28 2200-25 607-0 51
2200-2259 29 14 79 1.2 108 1.2 525 44
2300-2359 13 0.6 51 0.8 64 0.7 371 3.1

2070 6611 8681 11,989

44


Deaths
20 1959-1994

Ficure 4. US map of number of lightning deaths by state from 1959 to 1994.

Death rank
1959-1994

B

Rank
1-10
11-20
21-30
031-52

FiGure 5. US map of lightning deaths ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.



B. DEATHS

Maps of lightning-caused fatalities are
shown in Figures 4 and 5, and states with the
most and least deaths in Tables 6 and 7.
Florida has twice as many deaths compared to
any other state in Storm Data.

A major change from previous results for
casualties is the absence of Michigan in the
highest totals of deaths (Table 6), indicating
that injuries have been more commonly-
reported than deaths in Michigan. Otherwise,
the same states are in the first-ten list for both
deaths and casualties, although ina different
order. Also, Maryland and Arkansas for deaths
replace Georgia and Colorado on the casualty
list. The large Maryland entry is mainly due to
the 81 deaths in a lightning-caused aircraft
crash in 1963.

In terms of the least lightning-caused
fatalities, there were no deaths in Hawaii and
Alaska. The bottom-ten list in Table 7 includes
the same states as casualties (Table 5), except
New Hampshire and Rhode Island replace
Delaware and Puerto Rico.

Lightning deaths from Storm Data at
specific locations in the US were shown from
1959 to 1965 by Zegel (1967). Storm Data
deaths were plotted by state in Mogil et al.
(1977) for 1968 to 1976, and Duclos and
Sanderson (1990) for 1968 to 1985.

Pakiam et al. (1981) plotted each fatality
onamap of Singapore. Coates et al.. (1993) for
Australia and Gourbiere et al.. (1997) for France
showed maps of lightning deaths divided by
political boundaries in formats similar to
Figure 5. In the US, state maps of lightning
deaths by county have been compiled for North
Carolina (Langley et al., 1991), Michigan
(Ferrett and Ojala, 1992), and Colorado (Lopez
et al., 1995).

There were 3239 Storm Data deaths in the
US from 1959 to 1994 (Table 3 and Figures 4 and
5) for an average of 90 per year. The same
analysis can be made for deaths using the
network-detected ground strikes as in the
previous section for casualties. The result is one
death for every 345,000 flashes in the US.

TABLE 6. Ten US locations with the most deaths due to
lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Number of deaths
1 Florida 345
2 North Carolina 165
3 Texas 164
4 New York 128
5 Tennessee 124
6 Louisiana 116
7 Maryland 116
8 Ohio 115
9 Arkansas 110

10 Pennsylvania 109

TABLE 7. Ten US locations with the least deaths due to
lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Number of deaths
43 Vermont 12
44 North Dakota ul
45 New Hampshire 8
46 Oregon 7
47 Nevada 6
48 District of Columbia - 5
49 Rhode Island 4
50 Washington 3
51 Alaska 0
52 Hawaii 0



DAMAGE
SSS

The most frequent cost of lightning-caused
damages in the US is between $5,000 and
$50,000 according to Storm Data. This range
accounts for half of all reports between 1959 and
1994. The categories of $500-5,000 and $50,000-
500,000 are also frequent. These three
categories account for 92.7% of the reports.
Detailed costs are shown in Figures 40 and 41,
and Tables 35 to 37.

All regions of the US have the interval of
$5,000-$50,000 as the most frequent amount
(Table 36). The next most frequent interval is
$500-$5,000.. There is a tendency for somewhat
higher costs from the southern plains eastward,
compared to the northern plains westward
(Table 36).

Decadal changes show that smaller losses
have been increasing while’ larger amounts
have been decreasing (Figure 41). Since
inflation has not been taken into account, the
shift is greater than shown by Storm Data.. No
obvious reason is apparent for this change.

The Storm Data amounts are greater than
insured lightning losses in Colorado, Utah, and
Wyoming (Holle et al., 1996). Those losses
were paid for insurance claims by homeowners
and some small businesses. Over a third of the
insurance losses were between $251 and $1000,
and a few were over $5000. This comparison
shows that Storm Data tends to include more
widely known events and fewer small losses. It
is not possible for National Weather Service
staff preparing Storm Data to be aware of
frequent small losses when they do not result in
a call to an emergency agency and are not in the
newspapers.

The following lists provide information on
the types of expensive events that tend to reach
the National Weather Service through the
newspaper clipping process, and an idea of the
variety of lightning damages that can occur.

ver
The 17 lightning losses over $5 million in
Storm Data (Tables 35 and 37) were mainly due
to forest fires; some homes were also destroyed
and crops were lost. The fires were in Oregon
(eight in 1987), Idaho (two in 1989), Montana
(two in 1984), and Arizona (one in 1990). The

57

Sd

other lightning losses over $5 million were from
damage to a factory, an oil tanker sunk at a
dock, a historic hotel, a propane truck exploded
at a lumber yard, and extensive damage to a
phone system.

There were 92 entries over a half million
dollars during these years; seven had no infor-
mation. The rest can be grouped as follows:

-13 forest fires in Oregon and Idaho.

-9 cases with one or more homes.

-9 manufacturing plants.

-8 agricultural facilities.

-8 retail stores.

-7 church properties.

-7 school properties.

-7 warehouses or wholesale businesses.

-4 apartment buildings.

-4 petroleum installations.

-2 aircraft or airport facilities.

-2 historic mansions.

-2 office buildings.

-One each telephone company, power substa-
tion, and building under construction.

50-500

Losses in $

500-5,000

5,000-50,000

50,000-500,000

500,000-5 million

5-50 million

‘Unknown

L 1 L 1
20 30 40
Percent

50

Ficure 40, Number of lightning damage reports by year
from 1959 to 1994 in the US.


C. NATIONAL BY SEASON

Seasonal totals of casualties and damages
reports are listed in Table 25. Maps of these
two categories are also given by state in Figure
29 based on Table 26.

Spring (March, April, May)

Casualties in spring show a_ similar
distribution to the annual pattern in Figure 2
with one exception.. The higher annual ranks in
the Northeast are much lower, most likely due
to less lightning during these spring months
than elsewhere.

Damage reports show a similar distribution
to the whole year in Figure 9, except for the
same reduction in the Northeast shown by
casualties.

& er (rune, Tuly, Ai t

Casualties in the summer are almost
identical in distribution to the map for the
entire year in Figure 2. This result is as
expected, since Tables 25 and 26 show that most
lightning casualties occur during summer.

Damage reports for the summer are also
very similar to the whole-year results shown in
Figure 9.

S,

Casualties show a return to high rankings
for states in the Southern Plains, as for spring.
West Coast states rank relatively high in
casualties during autumn, but rank very low
when the entire year is considered.

Damage reports are distributed similarly
in the autumn and spring.

40

TaBLe 25. Seasonal totals of numbers of annual
casualties and damage reports due to lightning in
the United States from 1959 through 1994.

Season Casualties Damage
reports
Spring 1840 3590
Summer 9586 13,369
Autumn 1464 2511
Winter 167 34

Casualties occurred in only 21 states during
winter. The highest concentration is in the
Southern Plains, as shown by monthly
distributions in Figure 28. West-coast states
continue to rank relatively high in casualties,
as in autumn. The largest number of deaths was
in Maryland (81) due to the December 1963
aircraft crash (sections 5B and 6A).

Damage reports are most common in the
Southern Plains, but are scarce in states to the
north. California and Hawaii are ranked
among the top 30 states, while they rank very
Jow in summer.

Insummary, summer maps of casualties and
damage reports closely follow the annual maps.
During other seasons, lightning cases are more
frequent in the southern regions of the United
States. Frequencies in the northeast are low
except during the summer, while they are high
in the West Coast states during autumn and
winter.


Figure 18 shows the annual numbers of
damage reports through the entire period of
record.. Holle et al.. (1996) showed that Storm
Data damages due to lightning are vastly
underreported.. Even though so many events are
missed, the sample appears to indicate a
systematic increase through time that could be
due to the increase in population.

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 phenom-
ena in Table 2.. For example, some years have
no hurricane deaths, and tornado casualties
vary widely among years due to individual
storm events. But the vulnerability to
lightning is a constant and widespread threat
to people and property during every thunder-
storm season.

28

1000

B o o
3 ° °
ray ° °

Damage reports

N
°
e

ie}
1960 1970

1980

FIGURE 18, Number of lightning damage reports by year
from 1959 to 1994 for the US.


B. REGIONAL

The times of casualties and damage reports
by region are in Figures 31 and 32. Highest
frequencies of casualties are typically within
one hour of 1500 LST.. Only the west coast has a
broad afternoon maximum from 1200 to 1900 LST
for a small sample size (100 casualties).
Damage reports usually peak an hour or two
later than casualties (Figure 30). In the plains
and midwest, many nighttime damage reports
may come from the nocturnal thunderstorms
mentioned earlier.

Figure 31 shows differences between plains
and midwest states, compared to the northeast,
southeast, and Rockies. The main departures
are in the afternoon, when the Rockies and
eastern states have 13% more casualties and 8%
more damages than on the plains and in the
midwest.. Relatively narrow distributions are

northeast. Time series in the plains and

midwest are broader.

+15
3 = Casualties »——«
 +10F 4
w Damages +~—
yo
2
Sa +5
E ul
oz
sg 0
2%
f2
a 5 Lititiitiiiiit
00 06 12 18 00

FIGURE 31. Differences between hourly percentages of
lightning casualties (solid line) and damage
reports (dashed) in plains and midwest regions

apparent in the Rockies, southeast, and minus Rockies, northeast, and southeast regions.
—=— Casualties Damages -—+——
Northern Northern Midwest
20 |. Rockies |b Plains 4k 420
r 410
v
Ky f a
0
West Northeast
20 | Coast 4

Southern
|_ Rockies

Southern’
Plains

00 03 06 09 12 15 18 21 00 00 03 06 09 12 15 18 21

Southeast

00 00 03 06 09 12 15 18 21 00

FicuRE 32. Time of day of lightning casualties (solid line) and damage reports (dashed) by region in %.

45


5. YEAR-TO-YEAR VARIATIONS

ES

A. NATIONAL BY YEAR

The number of lightning victims by year
from 1959 to 1994 is shown in Figure 16.. Only
during one year, 1963, were there more deaths
(210) than injuries (209).. While the number of
deaths have decreased, the number of injuries
has increased during the period, as shown by
the ratio of injuries to deaths in Figure 17.

When the growth in population is taken
into account during this period, the trends can
be separated into the following factors
considered in more detail by Lopez and Holle
(1995, 1996):

* A 30% linear reduction in the rate of
casualties per population during the period
is attributed to improved forecasts and
warnings, better awareness of the lightning
threat, better quality of buildings
available for ‘shelter, and/or other
socioeconomic changes.

* Anadditional 40% reduction in the rate of
deaths per population may be due to
improved emergency communications and
medical care, such as cardiopulmonary
resuscitation (CPR).

* The rate of injuries per population has
decreased by only 8% because of the
transfer of what may have become deaths
into injuries due to better medical attention
and other factors.

* Additional fluctuations on the scale of one
or two decades broadly parallel national-
scale changes in frequencies of thunderstorm
days, cyclones, and surface temperatures
(Lépez and Holle, 1996).

Other long-term series of lightning-caused
deaths include a decrease in the rate of deaths
per million people from 1922 to 1979 in
Singapore (Pakiam et al., 1981).. A greater
decrease was found in England and Wales from
1852 to 1990 (Elsom, 1993).. In Australia, Coates
et al.. (1993) found an increase in the absolute
number of deaths from 1824 to 1918, then a
decrease through 1991; however the fatality
rate per 100,000 people decreased through the
record. When the state of Colorado was
considered by Lépez et al. (1995), no steady
trend in the number of casualties was apparent
from 1950 to 1991.

SEAN ASEAN NAN ANNE SNATS

AAAS

Deaths, injuries, casualties

° A
1960 1970 1980 1990
FiGure 16. Number of lightning deaths, injuries, and

casualties (deaths and injuries) by year from 1959
to 1994 for the US.

|

x

N
t

Ratio of injuries to deaths

i)
1960 1970 1980 1990

FiGuRe 17. Ratio of the number of lightning injuries to
deaths by year from 1959 to 1994 for the US.


—, —, T. A. Heitkamp, M. Boyson, M.
Cherington, and K. Langford, 1993: The
underreporting of lightning injuries and
deaths in Colorado. Bulletin of the Amer-
ican Meteorological Society, 74, 2171-2178.

Lushine, J. B., 1996: Underreporting of lightning
deaths in Florida. Preprints, International
Lightning Detection Conference, November
6-8, Tucson, Arizona, Global Atmospherics,
Inc., Tucson, 5 pp.

Mogil, H. M., M.. Rush, and M.. Kutka, 1977:
Lightning---An update. Preprints, 10th
Conference on Severe Local Storms, October
18-21, Omaha, Nebraska, American Met-
eorological Society, Boston, 226-230.

Orville, R. E., 1991: Lightning ground flash
density in the contiguous United States—
1989. Monthly Weather Review, 119, 573-
577.

—, and A. C. Silver, 1997: Lightning ground
flash density in the contiguous United
States: 1992-95. Monthly Weather
Review, 125, 631-638.

64

Pakiam, J. E., T..C. Chao, and J. Chia, 1981:
Lightning fatalities in Singapore. The
Meteorological Magazine, 110, 175-187.

Paxton, C. H., and R.. F. Morales Jr., 1997:
Florida lightning victims during 1996.
NOAA Technical Attachment SR/SSD 97-
34, National Weather Service Southern
Region, Scientific Services Division, Fort
Worth, Texas, 5 pp.

Rasmusson, E.. M., 1971: Diurnal variation of
summertime thunderstorm activity over the
United States. U.S. Air Force Environ-
mental Technical Applications Center,
Technical Note 7-14, 13 pp.

Vigansky, H. N., 1985: General summary of
lightning, 1985. Storm Data, 27, No.. 12, 37-
44,

Weigel, E..P., 1976: Lightning, the underrated
killer. NOAA, 6, 4-11.

Zegel, F. H., 1967: Lightning deaths in the
United States: A seven-year survey from
1959 to 1965. Weatherwise, 20, 169-173,
179.

of


3. VARIATION BY STATE IN REPORTED FREQUENCIES

AAA AN

CAAT AAS

A. DEATHS AND INJURIES COMBINED (CASUALTIES)

Section 3 describes variations among states
in actual frequencies of lightning reports by the
use of maps and tables. This section shows
results without population _ weighting;
population is included in section 4.. Data used to
develop the following maps and tables are
given at the end of section 3.

The sum of fatalities and injuries together
is termed casualties. Figures 1 and 2 map the
sum of lightning-caused deaths and injuries.
Tables 4 and 5 give the top and bottom ten
locations for deaths and injuries combined. All
states are shown in descending order by the
number of casualties in Figure 3.. The largest
numbers of casualties are in Florida, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York.
Other high numbers are found in the southern
and eastern regions of the US, and some states
in the northeastern US where there is a large
population. Also evident is a large number of
casualties in the mountainous, dry states of
Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The
smallest numbers of lightning casualties are in
Alaska (none), Hawaii, the District of
Columbia, northwest US states, Puerto Rico,
and several small eastern states. Casualties by
county for Colorado are in Lépez et al. (1995).

There are 13,057 Storm Data casualties
from 1959 to 1994 (Table 3 and Figures 1 to 3) for
an average of 363 per year. The National
Lightning Detection Network identified an
average of 21,746,000 cloud-to-ground flashes
per year in the US from 1992 to 1995 (Orville
and Silver, 1997). Assuming this four-year
average to be representative, the result is a
casualty every 60,000 flashes. Since around
70% of the flashes were detected, about 86,000
flashes occur for each casualty. A similar
estimate can be made for Arizona from Lépez et
al. (1997). Making corrections for season,
analysis area, and detection efficiency, about
800,000 flashes per year occur in Arizona, while
there were 4.5 casualties per year from 1959-
1994 (Table 12). The resulting ratio in Arizona
is one casualty for every 175,000 flashes; this is
reasonable since there usually are fewer
flashes in Arizona than in the rest of the US
(Orville, 1991; Orville and Silver, 1997).

TABLE 4. Ten US locations with the most casualties
(deaths and injuries combined) due to lightning
from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State No..of deaths and injuries
1 Florida 1523
2 Michigan 732
3 Pennsylvania 644
4 North Carolina 629
5 New York 577
6 Ohio 545
7 Texas 498
8 Tennessee 473
9 Georgia 410

10 Colorado 394

TABLE 5. Asin Table 4 for the least casualties.

Rank State No. of deaths and injuries

43 Delaware 42
44 Washington 40
45 Puerto Rico 36
46 North Dakota 35
47 Vermont 30
48 Oregon 26
49 District of Columbia 23
50 Nevada 18
51 Hawaii 4
52 Alaska 0



Wyoming
New Mexico 7
Florida
Arkansas
Colorado

Mississippi
Oklahoma
Maine

South Dakota
North Carolina
Tennessee
South Carolina
Idaho

Kansas

Utah

New Hampshire
Louisiana
Montana
Michigan
Kentucky
lowa
Alabama
Georgia
Delaware
Nebraska
Arizona
Vermont
Massachusetts
Maryland
West Virginia
North Dakota
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
Rhode Island
‘Ohio

Virginia
Indiana
Minnesota
Texas
Missouri

D.C.
New York
Miinois
Connecticut
Nevada
New Jersey
Puerto Rico
‘Oregon
Washington
California
Hawaii
Alaska at ni L
° 2 4 6 8

Casualty rate per million people

Figure 12. Rate of lightning casualties (deaths and injuries combined) per
population ordered by state from 1959 to 1994.

18


11. LOCATION

Sc

The digital record of Storm Data divides
the locations of lightning casualties into eight
groups (Table 34), plus two unknown categories.
Figure 39 shows the US results in graphical
form. Comments on each category follow.

Not reported; various other and unknown

locations

There are many unknown or unreported
locations in the Storm Data record (40.4%)
according to Table 34. Regional percentages of
unknown casualties range from 27.5% in the
Northern Rockies to 59.5% on the west coast.
This category combines the two location
categories in Storm Data of “not reported” and
“at various other and unknown locations”.

ds
This is the next largest category in every
region and for the US (Table 34). The same
Storm Data categories were used by Ferrett and
Ojala (1992) for Michigan to find that ball
parks and playgrounds were the most frequent
locations of lightning victims from 1959 to 1987.

Under trees

The third largest group in the US, and in
most regions, involves people located under
trees.. Benjamin Franklin also commented on the
danger of being under trees over 200 years ago.
Ferrett and Ojala (1992) found that trees were
the third most frequent location for lightning
fatalities in Michigan. This is a very danger-
ous place to take shelter when lightning is
nearby.. Paxton and Morales (1997) found that
60% of the 1996 Florida lightning casualties
were under trees or makeshift shelters...

In the US and most of the regions, the next
highest percentage is related to the proximity
of the victim to bodies of water.

It is sometimes stated that golfers are the
most frequent victims of lightning. It is
apparent from this analysis that golfing is not
especially high on the list in most regions.

55

Diiv . I 1

While this category is small in Storm Data
since 1959, agricultural activities in rural areas
were one of the most common locations for
lightning victims early in the century and is
the subject of a study in progress by the authors.

Telephones are an infrequent but persistent
source of lightning casualties in all regions.
The issue of telephones and lightning victims
was examined in Australia by Andrews et al.
(1992).

Radi itt

These types of casualties occur at a low rate
in all regions since antennas may be the highest
objects in the immediate area.

The location categories in the digital Storm
Data dataset are of limited use; Ferrett and
Ojala (1992) are the only other researchers to
use these categories. But much can be learned
about the patterns and time trends in locations
of lightning victims by reviewing and
categorizing the information in the verbal
narratives of Storm Data. This large task has
not been performed for the US from 1959 to 1994,

trees

Farm and
heavy
equipment

Telephone

FicureE 39. Locations of US li

tning casualties from
1959 to 1994 including ui

own cases.


NTS

A

ACKNOWLEDGME
Bossi:

We appreciate the careful assistance of
Brian Mast of the University of Oklahoma in
checking the last few years of data, and in
compiling with great care many of the data

62

aE LAAN

lists used in this report. We also appreciate
the contributions by Jim and Jennifer Vavrek,
science teachers in Hammond, Indiana, for
their review of drafts of this publication.


TABLE 22. Number of casualties and damage reports by decade for all states, D. C, and Puerto
Rico during the decades of 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and first half of the 1990s.

State Casualties Damage reports
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990-94 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990-94

Alabama 77 56 86 60 54 64 105 59
Alaska 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1
Arizona 52 34 41 34 16 25 34 9
Arkansas 79 128 84 60 50 76 311 131
California 20 5 33 20 32 7 6 12
Colorado 85 60 141 91 63 42 113 83
Connecticut 13 29 25 11 70 75 79 28
Delaware 4 15 18 5 28 43 8 2
District of Columbia 3 6 1 12 2 7 1 3
Florida 278 484 322 412 46 141 131 129
Georgia 104 113 108 80 83 117 127 321
Hawaii 0 ) 1 3 6 5 2 1
Idaho 38 32 9 6 44 148 52 59
Ilinois 49 108 109 87 149 172 64 23
Indiana 82 52 28 60 77 98 67 98
Iowa 78 98 32 11 92 153 160 168
Kansas 95 41 64 13 580 268 110 75
Kentucky 108 63 77 20 180 265 102 17
Louisiana 136 100 65 45 62 63 117 70
Maine 51 26 19 23 91 48 64 45
Maryland 115 44 62 24 105 197 74 55
Massachusetts 104 101 74 39 166 174 178 57
Michigan 148 277 200 74 242 241 182 114
Minnesota 39 44 49 32 103 165 70 55
Mississippi 70 = 132 79 13 58 79 61 6
Missouri 39 74 25 27 87 117 17 25
Montana 21 16 12 8 32 18 12 25
Nebraska 38 26 23 19 95 224 146 95
Nevada 1 4 4 9 2 3 6 0
New Hampshire 14 14 37 11 60 40 64. 33
New Jersey 34 79 23 27 24 23 3 36
New Mexico 77 4S 97 26 12 15 6 21
New York 90 164 212 75 232 175 388 198
North Carolina 169 179 197 61 480 209 82 119
North Dakota 5 6 8 11 11 36 87 9
Ohio 77 160 241 66 112 163 98 37
Oklahoma 106 101 66 42 223 143 168 280
Oregon 7 12 5 1 47 51 34 7
Pennsylvania 195 130 179 112 426 642 192 154
Puerto Rico 11 5 13 2 0 2 2 0
Rhode Island 12 8 25 1 31 40 38 10
South Carolina 108 45 109 37 98 124 287 194
South Dakota 26 2 31 11 73 20 262 73
Tennessee 107 113 155 78 210 177 247 128
Texas 150 115 107 99 106 202 202 172
Utah 36 3 44 31 36 9 29 30
Vermont 18 7 3 2 74 27 15 33
Virginia 50 48 95, 42 98 160 101 124
Washington 9 9 6 16 14 13 15 11
West Virginia 15 25 31 35 67 31 23 25
Wisconsin 55 39 93 46 90 191 187 30
Wyoming 56 38 5 2 10 10 74 11

35


TABLE 23. Decadal variations of casualties and damage reports/million people/year for
all states, D. C., and Puerto Rico during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and first half of the

1990s.
EE
State Casualty rate Dama; I

1960s 1970s 1980s 1990-94 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990-94

Alabama 23 15 22 30 16 17° 26 29
Alaska 0 0 0 0 0 03 O02 04
Arizona 3.4 15 130 21 1.0 11 11 05
Arkansas 43 61 3.6 5.1 27 36 134 111
California 0.1 0 01 01 0.2 0 Qo OL
Colorado 43 24 46 55 3.2 16 37 5.0
Connecticut 05 0.9 0.8 0.7 25 24 25 17
Delaware 08 26 29 15 5.6 75 13 06
District of Columbia 0.4 09 02 40 0.3 10 O2 10
Florida 47 59 28 64 0.8 17 12 1.0
Georgia 24 22 18 25 19 230 21 99
Hawaii 0 0 01 05 0.9 06 02 02
Idaho 5.5 39 09 12 64 179 5.3 117
Tllinois 0.5 10 #10 #15 14 15 06 O04
Indiana 17 10 O05 22 1.6 18 12 35
Iowa 28 34 11 08 3.3 5.3 5.6 121
Kansas 43 18 26 10 262 116 #45 61
Kentucky 3.5 18 21 11 5.8 77 28 09
Louisiana 3.9 25 15 21 18 16 28 33
Maine 5.2 2.5 16 37 9.3 45 54 73
Maryland 3.3 11 14 10 3.0 48 16 23
Massachusetts 19 18 13 13 3.1 3.0 3.0 19
Michigan 18 31 22 16 29 27 20 25
Minnesota 11 11 12 15 29 42 1700 25
Mississippi 32 56 31 10 26 33 24 05
Missouri 09 15 05 11 19 24 04 1.0
Montana 3.1 2.2 15 11 47 24 15° 63
Nebraska 26 17° 15 20 66 14.7 9.3 12.0
Nevada 0.3 06 04 15 0.5 05 0.6 0
New Hampshire 21 17 36 20 89 48 63 59
New Jersey 0.5 11 03 07 04 0.3 Oo 09
New Mexico 78 39 69 34 12 13 04 28
New York 0.5 0.9 12 08 13 10° 22 22
North Carolina 3.5 33° 32 18 10.0 3.8 13 5.
North Dakota 0.8 0.9 1.2 3.4 18 5.7 13.5
Ohio 0.8 15 22 1.2 11 15 09
Oklahoma 43 3.6 21 27 91 5.1 54
Oregon 0.4 0.5 0.2 01 24 2.2 1.2
Pennsylvania 17 11 15 19 3.7 5.1 16
Puerto Rico 04 02 O04 O01 0 01 01
Rhode Island 13 08 26 02 3.4 42 39 20
South Carolina 43 16 330 © 21 3.9 43 87 11.1
South Dakota 3.9 0.3 45 3.2 10.8 29 378 20.9
Tennessee 29 27 3.3 3.2 5.6 42 5.2 5.2
Texas 14 0.9 0.7 12 1.0 16 13 2.0
Utah 37 02 #28 36 3.7 07° 18 35
Vermont 43 15 06 0.7 17.7 5.7 28 11.7
Virginia 12 10 16 14 23 3.2 18 4.0
Washington 0.3 0.2 13 0.6 04 0.3 0.3 0.2
West Virginia 0.8 14 17 3.9 3.7 17 12 28
Wisconsin 13 0.9 19 19 2.2 42 3.9 12
Wyoming 16.9 95 11 0.9 3.0 25 16.0 49

36


9. NUMBER OF VICT!

SESE eS

The most common situation is for one
lightning victim to be involved in an incident
when at least one person was killed or injured.
Tables 30 and 31 and Figure 36 show the number
of people per event by category.

For incidents involving deaths only, 91% of
the cases had one fatality. Another 8% of the
events had two people killed in the same
incident. One event had more than eight
people killed (Figure 36 and Table 31) when 81
people were killed in a Maryland airliner
crash in December 1963 (sections 5B and 6A).

For incidents involving injuries only, 68% of
the cases had one injury, which is a lower rate
than for deaths. The largest number of injuries
involved 90 people at a campground in
Michigan (section 3C) as reported by Ferrett
and Ojala (1992).

The distributions of casualty events in the
figure and both tables closely resemble the
injury distributions.

The same tendency for single victims has
been noted with other datasets:
°US, 1959 to 1965

Of the fatalities,

(Zegel, 1967).
*Singapore, 1922 to 1979

One person was involved in 85% of the

deaths (Pakiam et al., 1981).

* Australia, 1824 to 1991
Of the deaths, 92% occurred singly (Coates
et al., 1993),

*Colorado, 1950 to 1991

Only one person was involved in 89% of the

deaths, 70% of injuries, and 66% of the

casualties (Lépez et al., 1995).

In summary, lightning usually kills people
one at a time, while there is more than one
person involved in quite a few injury events.
The dominance of single-person events shows
the need for lightning safety education so that
people take personal responsibility for their
own threat from lightning.

70% occurred singly

ER EVE
as

So

51

SAAT

TABLE 30.

Short summary of deaths, injuries, and
in Storm Data incidents (%).

Victims Deaths Injuries Casualties
1 90.9% 68.2 68.4
78 174 174
>2 14 44 141
Incidents 2834 5212 7181

Taste 31. Number of deaths, injuries, and casualties in
each Storm Data incident.

Victims Deaths Injuries Casualties
One 2575 3553 4912
Two 220 908 1253
Three 2 306 445
Four 10 142 214
Five 2 ” 103
Six 2 54 74
Seven 1 42 47
Eight 1 20 2B
Nine 0 12 21
Ten 0 12 8
11-20 0 46 52
21-30 0 21 21
31-40 0 2 2
41-50 0 2 2
51-60 0 0 0
61-70 0 0 0
71-80 0 1 2
81-90 1 1 2
Incidents 2834. 5212 7181



a

Rank of damage rate
1959-1994

f Rank

®@ 1-10

i 11-20

J 21-30
0131-52

wv

Fiure 15. US map of rates of lightning damage reports ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

24



TABLE 32. Gender of lightning deaths in the US and TABLE 33. Gender of lightning deaths in the US and

geographical regions from 1959 to 1994 (%) geographical regions from 1959 to 1994 (%)

including unknown cases without unknown cases.
Region Male Female Unknown Region Male Female
West Coast West Coast

Deaths 78.4% 5.4 16.2 Deaths 93.6% 64

Injuries 405 12.7 46.8 Injuries 76.1 23.9

Casualties 49.1 11.0 39.9 Casualties 81.6 18.4
Northern Rockies Northern Rockies

Deaths 86.9 6.6 66 Deaths 93.0 7.0

Injuries 608 12.9 26.3 Injuries 82.5 17.5

Casualties 67.1 114 21.6 Casualties 85.5 14.5
Southern Rockies Southern Rockies

Deaths 69.1 17.8 13.0 Deaths 79.5 20.5

Injuries 66.7 13.6 19.7 Injuries 83.0 17.0

Casualties 67.4 14.8 178 Casualties 82.0 18.0
Northern Plains Northern Plains

Deaths 71.0 9.5 19.5 Deaths 88.2 11.8

Injuries 58.0 10.7 31.3 Injuries 84.5 15.5

Casualties 62.0 10.3 27.7 Casualties 85.8 14.2
Southern Plains Southern Plains

Deaths 75.0 16.2 88 Deaths 82.3 17.7

Injuries 65.4 13.9 20.6 Injuries 82.5 17.5

Casualties 68.5 14.6 16.9 Casualties 82.4 17.6
Midwest Midwest

Deaths 71.1 12.7 16.2 Deaths 84.8 15.2

Injuries 50.0 10.6 39.4 Injuries 82.4" 17.6

Casualties 54.3 111 34.6 Casualties 83.0 17.0
Northeast Northeast

Deaths 58.1 9.6 32.3 Deaths 85.8 14.2

Injuries 43.0 11.0 46.1 Injuries 79.7 20.3

Casualties 46.1 10.7 43.2 Casualties 81.2 18.8
Southeast Southeast

Deaths 68.5 12.9 18.6 Deaths 84.2 15.8

Injuries 56.9 11.6 315 Injuries 83.0 17.0

Casualties 59.7 11.9 - 283 Casualties 83.3 16.6
United States United States

Deaths 69.1 13.1 178 Deaths 84.1 15.9

Injuries 545 11.7 33.8 Injuries 82.3 17.7

Casualties 58.1 12.1 29.8 Casualties 82.8 17.2

54


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, C..J., M. A. Cooper, M.. Darveniza,
and D. Mackerras, 1992: Lightning injuries:
Electrical, medical, and legal aspects.. CRC
Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 195 pp.

Cherington, M., 1995: Central nervous system
complications of lightning and electrical
injuries. Seminars in Neurology, 15, 233-240.

Coates, L., R.. Blong, and F.. Siciliano, 1993:
Lightning fatalities in Australia, 1824-1991.
Natural Hazards, 8, 217-233.

Cooper, M. A., 1995: Myths, miracles, and
mirages.. Seminars in Neurology, 15, 358-
361.

—, and C.J. Andrews, 1995: Lightning injuries.
In Wilderness Medicine, P.. Auerbach,
Editor, 3rd Edition, St.. Louis, Missouri, C.V.
Mosby-Yearbook, 261-289.

Dittmann, R. H., 1994: Annual flood death
statistics per state per capita for the
United States and Puerto Rico during the
period 1959-1991.. NOAA Technical Memo-
randum NWS SR-153, National Weather
Service Southern Region, Scientific Ser-
vices Division, Fort Worth, Texas, 11 pp.

Duclos, P. J., and L. M. Sanderson, 1990: An
epidemiological description of lightning-
related deaths in the United States.
International Journal of Epidemiology, 19,
673-679.

—, — and K.. C.. Klontz, 1990: Lightning-
related mortality and morbidity in
Florida. Public Health Reports, 105, 276-
282.

Elsom, D..M., 1993: Deaths caused by lightning
in England and Wales, 1852-1990.
Weather, 48, 83-90.

Emanuel, K., D. Raymond, A. Betts, L.. Bosart,
C. Bretherton, K.. Droegemeier, B. Farrell,
J. M. Fritsch, R.. Houze, M. Le Mone, D.
Lilly, R. Rotunno, M. Shapiro, R.. Smith,
and A.. Thorpe, 1995: Report of the first
prospectus development team of the U.S.
Weather Research Program to NOAA and
the NSF. Bulletin of the American Met-
eorological Society, 76, 1194-1208.

Ferrett, R. L. and C. F, Ojala, 1992: The
lightning hazard in Michigan. Michigan
Academician, 24, 427-441.

Goodman, S. J., and D. R MacGorman, 1986:
Cloud-to-ground lightning activity in

AAA

63

So

sc AUNAARANRRRNON ALARA
mesoscale convective complexes. Monthly
Weather Review, 114, 2320-2328.

Gourbiere, E., J. Lambrozo, C. Virenque, P.
Menthonnex, and J. Cabane, 1997:
“Lightning injured people in France” the

-- first French national inquiry with regard to
the striking of people — objectives, methods,
first results. Proceedings, Lightning and
Mountains ‘97, Chamonix Mt..Blanc, France,
M71-M83.

Holle, R..L., R.. E.. Lopez, L. J. Arnold, and J.
Endres, 1996: Insured lightning-caused
property damage in three western states.
Journal of Applied Meteorology, 35, 1344-
1351.

—, A.I. Watson, R..E. Lépez, D. R.. MacGorman,
R.. Ortiz, and W.. D.. Otto, 1994: The life
cycle of lightning and severe weather in a
3-4 June 1985 PRE-STORM mesoscale
convective system. Monthly Weather
Review, 122, 1798-1808.

—, R. E. Lépez, R. Ortiz, A. I. Watson, D. L.
Smith, D.. M. Decker, and C.. H. Paxton,
1992: Cloud-to-ground lightning related to
deaths, injuries, and property damage in
central Florida. Proceedings, Internation-
al Aerospace and Ground Conference on
Lightning and Static Electricity, Atlantic
City, New Jersey, FAA Report No.
DOT/FAA/CT-92/20, 66-1-66-11.

Langley, R..L., K.. A. Dunn, and J. D. Esinhart,
1991: Lightning fatalities in North
Carolina 1972-1988. North Carolina
Medical Journal, 52, 281-284.

Lopez, R. E., and R. L. Holle, 1995: Demo-
graphics of lightning casualties. Seminars
in Neurology, 15, 286-295.

—, and —, 1996: Fluctuations of lightning
casualties in the United States:. 1959-1990.
Journal of Climate, 9, 608-615.

—, — and T. A. Heitkamp, 1995: Lightning
casualties and property damage in
Colorado from 1950 to 1991 based on Storm
Data. Weather and Forecasting, 10, 114-
126.

——, A. I. Watson, and J. Skindlov, 1997:
Spatial and temporal distributions of
lightning over Arizona from a power utility
perspective. Journal of Applied Meteorol-
ogy, 36, 825-831.


ABSTRACT

‘SSSR ENN EEA NERA

ALANA ANA

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 betweer $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.

iv


7. TIME OF DAY VARIATIONS

REARRANGE EE EE RE SE NNT
A. NATIONAL

The time of day when casualties and
damages due to lightning were reported in the
US shows a strong dominance of afternoon
reports (Figure 30 and Table 27).. Two-thirds of
the casualties occur between noon and 6 p.m.
Local Standard Time (LST). Casualties show a
steady increase toward a maximum at 1600 LST,
followed by a slightly slower decrease after
the maximum. Therefore, most of the
lightning-vulnerable activities engaged by
people occur during the day.

However, damage reports are more broadly
distributed through the 24hour day. They
show a steeper increase toward a maximum at
1700 LST than the decline after the maximum
toward midnight. There is another slight
increase in damages reports between one and
two hours after midnight.

Differences between the two time series are
in lower Figure 30. During the afternoon, there
are up to 6% more casualties than damage
reports. But at night, some hours have more
than 3% less casualties than damage reports.

The difference at night is apparently due to
the immobile nature of buildings and other
objects.. In contrast, people are less prone to be
involved in lightning-sensitive activities at
night, and also tend to avoid brightly-
illuminated nighttime storms. There is a type
of nocturnal thunderstorm complex, the
mesoscale convective system, that occurs over
the plains states during the summer, and
produces tremendous amounts of lightning.
These mesoscale convective systems, sometimes
covering areas the size of Iowa, can produce
rates over 3000 ground strikes per hour
(Goodman and MacGorman, 1986; Holle et al.,;
1994).

Table 27 shows the numbers that were used
to construct Figure 30.. Not all Storm Data
entries have times reported.. Of the 13,057
casualties in Table 3, Table 27 shows that 8681
(66%) have times, while 61% of the damage
reports have times associated with the report.

15

——"— Casualties

--*"-- Damages

damages (%)

Casualties minus

Ficure 30. Top: Time of day of lightning casualty and damage reports for the United States from 1959 to 1994.
Bottom: Percent casualties minus percent damage reports by hour. Time label for end of hour.

43


t Casualties re 4 Damages
Sprin: a 5
“4 :

Rank tected
@ 1-10
11-20
21-30
031-52

tine

Casualties iy Damages

Summer . jummer

+

iy
ni Casualties Damages
G Autumn maeeeeie utumn
== Hy on
a
eel Casualties ‘ee Damages
a Winter, & Winter,
fv : seesces :
HH ‘ ¥ 33
EN THe
Rank Ht
0 m 1-10 |
11-21
GNone

FIGURE 29. Seasonal variations of lightning casualties and damage reports by state.

41



D. DAMAGE REPORTS

Maps of damage reports are in Figures 8 and
9 by state. Locations with the most and least
damage reports are in Tables 10 and 11.

It is apparent that damage reports in Storm
Data are distributed very differently than are
deaths and/or injuries. A high concentration of
damage reports is evident over the plains from
South Dakota to Texas. The highest number of
damage reports is from Pennsylvania, where
less than half as many casualties were reported
as in Florida. In contrast, Florida is first on all
casualty lists but is not high on the list of
damages. Seven of the ten states with the
highest damage counts are on the first-ten lists
for casualties, deaths, or injuries. While
Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina rank in
the first eight for damages, they are not in the
top-ten list for any casualty category.

The least damage reports are from Alaska
(3), Puerto Rico (4), and many of the same
locations as in the casualty lists. An exception
is the small number of damage reports from
New Mexico, a state with a high number of
deaths (Figure 4).

In the US, state maps of lightning damages
by county have been compiled for Michigan
(Ferrett and Ojala, 1992), Colorado (Lépez et
al., 1995), and Colorado, Utah and Wyoming
(Holle et al., 1996).

There is a weakly-defined geographical
pattern (not shown) in the ratio of damage
reports to casualties in Storm Data. The
damage/casualty report ratio was near one, or
less, in all southwestern states, and several
southeastern states including Florida. The
northwest half of the US tended to have nearly
two damage reports for every casualty report.
Whether the ratio is influenced by accurate
reporting of every death or injury, or whether
the reporting system in some states is not very
complete in reporting damages is unknown.

It is also unknown why there should be any
pattern since damage reports are so greatly
underreported (Section 2). Damage reports in
Storm Data are underreported by as much as
367:1, as described in Section 2 based m
insurance claims in Holle et al. (1996).
Therefore, rates of flashes per damage report
cannot be made reliably from the available
database as was done for casualties, deaths,
and injuries in previous sections.

11

TABLE 10. Ten US locations with the most damage
reports due to lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm
Data.

Rank State Number of damage reports
1 Pennsylvania 1441
2 Kansas 1182
3 New York 1005
4 North Carolina 960
5 Oklahoma 826
6 Michigan 814
7 Tennessee 764
8 South Carolina 717
9 Texas 689
10 Georgia 656
TABLE 11. Ten US locations with the least damage

reports due to lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm
Data.

Rank State Number of damage reports
4B Arizona 84
44 Delaware 83
45 California 60
46 Washington 56
47 New Mexico 54
48 District of Columbia 4
49 Hawaii 4
50 Nevada 1
51 Puerto Rico 4
52 Alaska 3



10. GENDER

AAA

Most lightning victims are male, as shown
in Figures 37 and 38, and Tables 32 and 33. The
results use the Storm Data categories in the
digital database of male, female, both, or
unknown. Cases classified as ‘both’ in the
death category indicate that one male and one
female were killed in the same event; these
cases were split between male and female in
the analyses. Similar definitions apply to
injuries and casualties. For the entire US,
17.8% of the deaths do not have gender
reported (Table 32). A larger number of injuries,
33.8%, do not specify gender, and 29.8% of
casualties are unspecified. Since the unknown
portions are large, and assuming no gender bias
for unreported cases, results are shown with and
without unknowns.

Including unknown cases, deaths by gender
is shown in Figure 37. Males are the most
frequent lightning victims, but the unknown
category is larger than the female group.
Figure 37 is shown for deaths because the
percentage of cases with no gender reported was
much less for deaths than injuries. By region,
when unknown cases are included, more than
half of all deaths and injuries involved one or
more males, except for injuries in the west coast,
midwest, and northeast. Another 5 to 18%
involved one or more females. The largest
number of unknown cases was 46.1% in the
northeast for injuries (Table 32).

Ficure 37. Gender of US lightning deaths
from 1959 to 1994 including unknown
cases.

53

For the US without the unknown cases,
Figure 38 shows that males are the most
frequent lightning fatalities (84.1%). By region
(Table 33), the male component ranged from
76.1 to 93.6% for deaths and injuries. The
female range was 6.4 to 23.9% in the regions.

In summary, males are killed 4.6 times as
often as females, and are 5.3 times as likely as
females to be injured. There are twice as many
injuries as deaths without a gender specified in
the Storm Data digital dataset.

Males also comprised between 79 and 89%
of the victims in the US (Duclos and Sanderson,
1990), Florida (Duclos et al., 1990; Holle et al.,
1992; Paxton and Morales, 1997), and North
Carolina (Langley et al., 1991). Similar ratios
were found in Singapore (Pakiam et al., 1981),
and England and Wales (Elsom, 1993).

Many of the same studies showed that
males in their twenties are the most frequent
victims of lightning. The digital record in
Storm Data does not include the victim’s age
but its verbal narrative usually does.. For this
reason, an age analysis of the entire Storm
Data record was not made for the present
report.

FiGuRE 38. Gender of US lightning deaths
from 1959 to 1994 without unknown
cases.


TABLE 37. Costs of US lightning damage in
Storm Data from 1959-1994, without
unknowns.

Damage Category % of total

$ 0- 50 0.8
50- 500 5.5

500 - 5,000 23.1
5,000- 50,000 49.4
50,000- 500,000 20.2
500,000- 5,000,000 1.0

5,000,000-50,000,000 0.1



E. SUMMARY

Table 12 provides the detailed list of
reported frequencies and corresponding ranks of
fatalities, injuries, casualties, and damage
reports for all states and other locations in the
dataset. Information in this table was used to
develop the preceding maps and tables.

Florida led the nation in deaths, injuries,
and therefore casualties, over all other
locations by a wide margin. States with high
numbers of casualties (Figures 1, 2) tended to be
in the following categories:
¢ Florida--very frequent casualties and a

sizable population.

* Southeast and southern plains--frequent
casualties and medium to large populations
(Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas).

* Midwest and northeast--densely populated
(Michigan, New York, Ohio).

* Southern Rockies--less populated than
many states (Arizona, Colorado, New
Mexico).

13

The largest number of damage reports came
from Pennsylvania, but it had less than half as
many casualties as Florida. North Carolina
had uniformly high frequencies in all
categories — second in deaths, fourth in injuries,
and fourth in damages. In contrast, Kansas was
second in damage reports but twenty-fifth in
deaths and twenty-second in injuries. There
were a few locations, such as Alaska, Hawaii,
Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and
Nevada, with very few casualties and damage
reports over the 36-year period.

Data from recent years collected by the US
National Lightning Detection Network results
in a rough estimate of one lightning casualty for
every 86,000 flashes. A similar method gives
an estimate of one death for about every 345,000
flashes, and an injury for about every 114,000
flashes.


CONTENTS |

Abstract

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

. Introduction
. Lightning Report Data

. Variations by State in Reported Frequencies

A. Deaths and Injuries Combined (Casualties)
B. Deaths

C. Injuries

D. Damage Reports

E. Summary

. Variations by State Weighted by Population

. Death and Injury (Casualty) Rate per Population
Death Rate per Population
Injury Rate per Population

. Damage Report Rate per Population

Summary

MONF>

. Year-to-year Variations

A. National by Year
B. National by Decade
C. Regional by Decade
D. States by Decade

. Monthly and Seasonal Variations

A. National by Month
B. Regional by Month
C. National by Season

Time of Day Variations
A. National
B. Regional
C. 6-Hour Periods
D. Seasons

Day of Week Variations
Number of Victims Per Event
Gender

Location

Damage Report Costs

Summary and Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

iii


asualty rate

Damage rate

in H 1960s 1960s,
Rank
an m 1-10
@ 11-20
021-30
031-52
wd Ff iY Casualty rate Damage rate
1970s ret 1970s

[as

", Casualty rate
¢ 1980s

Ht

Damage rate
1980s

Casualty rate
1990s

Fiure 25. Decadal variations of the rates of lightning casualties and damages by state.

34


Rank of injury rate

1959-1994

Anti

sel

=

¥ + Rank

i 1-10

y 11-20
£7] 21-30
131-52

aT

g

FIGURE 14. US map of rates of lightning injuries ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

22



NOTICE

Mention of a commercial company or product does not constitute an endorsement by NOAA/ERL
or the National Weather Service. Use of information from this publication concerning proprietary
products or the tests of such products for publicity or advertising purposes is not authorized.

Prrirororeg

This printing includes minor changes to the text and references in the original printing, dated
August 1997.

For Sale by the National Technical Information Service, 5385 Port Royal Road
Springfield, VA 22161

ii


C. 6-HOUR PERIODS

Casualties and damage reports by 6-hour
periods of the day are shown by maps in Figure
33. These results can be compared to Figure 2 for
casualties and Figure 9 for damage reports
during all hours.

i y
Casualties and damage reports during the
nighttime are most frequent in the plains and
upper midwest states, and a few populous
eastern states. Compared to maps in Figures 2
and 9 for the entire sample, there is a shift in
the highest-ranking states to the north and
east from Texas, through Oklahoma and the
Plains states, to Wisconsin. Only the first 27
ranks of casualties are shown, since all states
ranked lower than 27th have one or zero
casualties. There were 62 deaths (3% of the
day’s fatalities with known times), 135 injuries
(2%), and 1753 damage reports (15%) in Storm
Data during these hours.

Of particular interest is how a lightning
casualty can occur during these night to early
moming hours. There were 29 deaths in 19
events between midnight and 0559 LST since
1980 in Storm Data. Of this total, 59% of the
deaths and 58% of the events occurred when
people were in a house set on fire by lightning.
The next most common situation occurred when
people were camping in tents (21% of the
deaths and 16% of the events). Remaining
incidents since 1980 involved a backpacker, an
airman in an Air Force hangar, a driver losing
control of his truck when it was struck by
lightning while crossing a bridge, a night
watchman at a factory, and people walking in
a field. .

lornin

Casualties during the moming are spread
widely across the country. Damage reports are
Most common in the plains states in a similar
pattern to the map for nighttime hours. There
were 237 deaths (11%), 851 injuries (13%), and
1218 damage events (10%) in Storm Data during
these morning hours.

Afternoon (1200-1759 LST)

Casualties during the afternoon resemble
Figure 2 for the entire day. This result is to be
expected since these are the most frequent hours
for deaths and injuries. There were 1397 deaths
(67%) and 4169 injuries (63%) in Storm Data
during these hours. Damage reports are not as
closely related to the 24-hour map in Figure 9,
since the 4952 damage reports are only 41% of
the Storm Data reports during these hours.

ening (1800-:

Casualties during the evening have the
same shift in highest-ranking states to the
north and east from Texas as noted for
nighttime hours. Damage reports during the
evening are similar to the whole-day map in
Figure 9 and the afternoon map in Figure 30.
There were 374 deaths (18%), 1457 injuries
(22%), and 4064 damage reports (34%) in Storm
Data during these hours.

Afternoon maps of both casualties and
damage reports have the largest 6-hour sample
sizes of the day and dominate Figures 2 and 9
for the whole day. There is a substantial
number of high-ranking states for both
categories in the southeast and eastern states.
However, during other time periods, the maps
show a tendency for events to occur away from
the east and southeast, and greater activity m
the plains and eastward to the midwest.
Rasmusson (1971) found a similar pattern in the
diurnal distribution of thunderstorms based m
audible thunder reports.

Other studies have shown afternoon
maxima in lightning impacts according to
three- or six-hour periods:

* Deaths, injuries, and damage reports in
central Florida from 1983 to 1990 (Holle et

al., 1992).

* Fatalities in Australia from 1824 to 1991

(Coates et al., 1993).

* Casualties and damage reports in Colorado

from 1950 to 1991 (Lépez et al., 1995).


C. REGIONAL BY DECADE

Eight regions of the United States were
used for many of the subsequent analyses in this
paper, as shown by Figure 21. The decadal
trends in both casualties and damages are
graphed for the eight regions in Figures 22 and
23.

Most regions have as many or more damage
reports as casualties in both the actual and
population-weighted time series. The only
exceptions are in the southern Rockies and the
southeast, where relatively few damages are
reported.

Some general conclusions from reported
frequencies in Figure 22 are the following:

* Casualties increased during the last two
decades in the southeast, southern Rockies,
and west coast states, but not elsewhere.

¢ Damage reports increased during the last
two decades in all regions except in the
west coast, midwest and northeast regions.
Population-weighted results in Figure 23

indicate that:

* Recent trends in casualties and damages for
the west coast region are not as strong when
population is taken into account as the
actual reports indicated.

* Weighting by population made ro
difference in the other six regions.

Southem

Rockies

No.

Ficure 21. US regions for analysis of Storm Data entries.

30


B. REGIONAL BY MONTH

Monthly distributions of casualties and
damage reports by region of the country are
shown in Figures 27 and 28, Most regions show
damage reports to be spread somewhat more
widely through the year than casualties.
Casualties and damages in the northern regions
of the country tend to have narrower
distributions centered on summer than regions in
the southern US due to a shorter thunderstorm
season in colder regions. The broadest monthly
distributions are in the Southern Plains.

Figure 27 shows the differences between
monthly percentage frequencies in the Northern
Rockies, Northern Plains, Midwest, and
Northeast, and percent frequencies in the
Southern Rockies, Southern Plains, and
Southeast. Northern regions have up to 4%
more casualties and damages in midsummer,

+
ES

Casualties

+
N

‘
Nn

& Damages

Northern minus southern regions (%)
°

JFMAMJJASOND

‘
&

FiGuRE 27. Differences between monthly percentages of
lightning casualties (solid line) and damage
reports (dashed) in northern minus southern

while southern regions have more cases in regions of the US.
spring and, to a lesser extent, in autumn.
OI Casualties Ei Damages
40 40
Northern Northera Midwest
Rockies Plains
30 & aIF- 7 OF rh 7 30
20 - ar tor 4 20
10 b 4b I a ok 4 10
eee. NI al |
West Northeast
30 £ Coast | | 4 30
20 b ~d - 4 20
ce 4 re 4 10
0 L_naalbll ra. i wall [Exon 6
Southern Southern is Southeast
Rockies Plains
30 4 b 4 30
20 - 4 a 4 20
1o fF [ 4 b 1 + 10
0 re [Ls =| L__rare, | a 0

JFMAMJJASOND

JFMAMJJASOND

JFMAMJJASOND

Ficure 28. Monthly variations of lightning casualties and damage reports by region of the US (%).

39


E. SUMMARY

Table 21 lists the rates of fatalities,
injuries, casualties, and damage reports, and
corresponding ranks for the dataset. Infor-
mation in this table was: used to develop the
preceding maps and tables.

Wyoming and New Mexico led the nation in
rates of lightning-caused deaths, injuries, and
casualties. However, Wyoming had almost all
of its casualties in the 1960s and 1970s (section
5). States with high rates of casualties
(Figures 11 to 14) were as follows:

* Rockies — high rates of casualties but less
populous (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New

Mexico, Montana, Utah, Wyoming).

* Plains — high rates of casualties, and
average to less than average populations
(Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma,

South Dakota).
* Southeast and adjacent states - moderate to
high rates of casualties and average state

25

populations (Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky,

Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina,

South Carolina, Tennessee).

* Northeast - moderate to high rates of
casualties and less populous (Maine, New
Hampshire, Vermont).

¢ Florida — very high rate of casualties and
very populous.

The highest rates of damage reports were
in a swath on the plains from North Dakota to
Oklahoma. The pattern of damage report rates
in many locations was not especially
meaningful, since some states have
exceptionally high or low ratios of reports to
casualties for unknown reasons. For example,
New Mexico had a low damage rate while it
was second in casualty rates. Puerto Rico,
California, and Alaska had very low rates of
damage reports.


C. INJURIES

Figures 6 and 7 show maps of injuries by
state. Locations with the most and least
injuries are in Tables 8 and 9. Florida had more
injuries than any other state since 1959, as well
as deaths (Table 6) and casualties (Table 4).
For example, there were 105 injuries in Florida
in 1996 alone (Paxton and Morales, 1997).

The same states appear on the first-ten list
of fatalities in Table 8 except for two changes.
Michigan is second in injuries but twelfth in
deaths. Also, Georgia and Massachusetts on
the injury list replace Arkansas and Maryland
on the fatality list. The least injuries are in
Alaska (0), Hawaii (4), Puerto Rico (6), and
other western states and small eastern states.

The large number of Michigan injuries is due
in part to two exceptional events (Ferrett and
Ojala, 1992). During one Storm Data case in
August 1975, 90 people were injured when
lightning struck near the center of a campground
at Leslie, Michigan. In June 1979, 45 National
Guard soldiers suffered minor injuries when
lightning struck their camp near Grayling,
Michigan. A US map of injuries was shown for
1968 to 1976 by Mogil et al. (1977), and a state
map of injuries by Colorado county was
compiled by Lépez et al. (1995).

Most states have more injuries than deaths;
the US average ratio is 2.54 injuries per death
in Storm Data from 1959 to 1994. But Missouri
had only slightly more injuries (93) than
deaths (78), and Puerto Rico had 6 injuries but
30 deaths; a few other locations approach a 1:1
ratio. A map of the injury to death ratio by
state (not shown) has no pattern. In Puerto
Rico, the authors found that many lightning
injuries occur there but are not widely known,
while deaths are usually reported-to the
National Weather Service and included in
Storm Data. A low ratio of injuries to fatalities
may indicate underreporting of injuries, such
that deaths are better reported. Lépez et al.
(1993) found a greater underreporting of injuries
requiring hospitalization (42%) than under-
reporting of deaths (28%) in Colorado.

There were 9818 Storm Data injuries in the
US from 1959 to 1994 (Table 3 and Figures 6 and
7). The same analysis for injuries using
network-detected lightning as in previous
sections results in one US injury for every
114,000 flashes.

TABLE 8. Ten US locations with the most injuries due
to lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Number of injuries
1 Florida 1178
2 Michigan 643
3 Pennsylvania 535
4 North Carolina 464
5 New York 449
6 Ohio 430
7 Tennessee 349
8 Texas 334
9 Massachusetts 331
10 Georgia 329

TABLE 9. Ten US locations with the least injuries due
to lightning from 1959-1994 in Storm Data.

Rank State Number of injuries
43 Washington 37
44 Delaware 27
45 North Dakota 24
46 Oregon 19
47 Vermont 18
48 District of Columbia 18
49 Nevada 12
50 Puerto Rico 6
51 Hawaii 4
52 Alaska 0



infrequent but persistent source of casualties,
while people in proximity to radios and
antennas were the least frequent category in
Storm Data. More studies are needed of the
locations around lightning victims and what
they were doing than is available in the
digital Storm Data listing.

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

61

Possible future enhancements of this work
include comparisons of the casualty and
damage results with lightning ground-strike
data collected over the US since the late 1980s.
Such results can compare detected flashes with
state-by-state casualties and damages om
annual, diurnal, monthly, and seasonal scales.
Other relationships to lightning reports and
flash activity should be considered, such as
per-capita income, and agricultural and
recreational activity by state and season.


Rank 7 SP Rank
. 4-10 eee! @ 1-10

- 11-20 R 8 11-20
Casualties 021-27 Damages 021-30
0000-0559 LST 02852 0000-0559 LST 031-52

Z TI .
eaaeeeags tasse.t
i AEH
Casualties Damages a
0600-1159 LST 0600-1159 LST
oft FE :
Ay Xie
ba forth
Casualties Damages
1200-1759 LST 1200-1759 LST
HY fH
rH
+H af

Casualties Damages
1800-2359 LST 1800-2359 LST

FIGURE 33. Rank of lightning casualties and damage reports by 6-hour periods and state of the US from 1959 to 1994.

47


TABLE 28. Seasonal variations in the time of day of casualties and damage reports (%) due to lightning in the
United States from 1959 through 1994.

——Spring___  ___Summer _ Autumn Winter
Time Casualties Damages Casualties Damages Casualties Damages Casualties Damages
0000-0059 LST 04% 22 02 20 0.6 28 16 56
0100-0159 04 35 05 29 0.6 46 0 47
0200-0259 02 36 05 24 04 3.0 0 38
0300-0359 02 26 02 21 03 3.6 0 5.6
0400-0459 02 20 03 19 14 26 0 34
0500-0559 0 20 04 18 08 23 0 26
0600-0659 08 2.2 05 16 0.9 22 16 43
0700-0759 09 17 07 12 68 25 32 3.0
0800-0859 13 15 15 16 14 2.0 238 3.0
0900-0959 29 19 12 12 24 28 1 17
1000-1059 8.2 26 3.0 15 2.0 16 95 34
1100-1159 27 16 38 18 3.0 22 48 38
1200-1259 79 35 63 25 8.0 3.0 48 3.0
1300-1359 75 38 97 5.0 83 3.2 0 26
1400-1459 134 56 121 76 48 61 175 56
1500-1559 u2 63 14.2 97 10.7. 67 79 34
1600-1659 114 8.0 109 105 126 79 16 51
1700-1759 97 8.0 124 95 68 7.2 16 38
1800-1859 70 8.0 95 85 57 65 16 60
1900-1959 40 67 46 71 51 68 32 56
2000-2059 3.0 72 34 61 3.8 61 32 64
2100-2159 37 55 24 47 2.2 61 0 47
2200-2259 23 57 11 39 08 5.0 32 51
2300-2359 08 40 08 28 07 3.2 0 38
Number 1324-2248 6229-7989 1065 1517 6 234

49


Damage reports
1959-1994

wi 56 NO 145
150 ? 305

60 1 107

FicurE8. US map of number of lightning damage reports by state from 1959 to 1994.

wi Damage report rank
LLC of 1959-1994

Rank
@ 1-10
11-20
WAS 21-30

031-52
e

FIGURE9. US map of lightning damage reports ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.

12