Deaths, Injuries, and Damages from Lightning in the United States in the 1890s in Comparison with the 1990s

Abstract

A reduction by a factor of 10 in the population-weighted rate of lightning-caused deaths over the last century has been determined in several previous studies. The reasons have been attributed to a number of factors, but none have been quantified in detail with a large dataset. Several thousand lightning-caused deaths, injuries, and reports of property damage in the United States from 1891 to 1894 were analyzed manually from descriptions provided by an 1895 data source. A similar manual analysis was made of information in the NOAA publication Storm Data 100 yr later, from 1991 to 1994. Comparisons show that the decrease in lightning risk to people coincides with a shift in population from rural to urban regions. Major changes in the types of property damaged by lightning between the two periods 100 yr apart are also shown. In addition, the results identify significant shifts in the kinds of incidents in which people and objects are impacted by lightning. This information can help in the development of better guidelines for lightning safety and education.

Lightning fatalities over India: 1979–2011

“…Far more males (89%) than females (5%) have been killed by lightning flashes in India, as shown in Figure 7. These findings are in contrast to other regions such as South Africa (64%) (Eriksson and Smith, 1986), United Kingdom (65%) (Elsom, 2001) and Swaziland (68%) (Dlamini, 2009), whereas they were found comparable to (79-89%) Singapore (Pakiam et al, 1981), England and Wales (Elsom, 1993), Australia (Coates et al, 1993), the United Statas Curran et al, 2000;Holle et al, 2005) and Colombia (Aldana et al, 2014). Remarkably, male and female fatality ratio indicates that males are killed 18 times more frequently than females.…”

“…Further, the annual variations can be attributed to the inter-annual variations in the climatic patterns affecting India resulting from regional and global climatic instabilities and teleconnections (Thapliyal and Kulshreshtha, 1991;Bhutiyani et al, 2007Bhutiyani et al, , 2010Dash and Hunt, 2007). Notable increase in lightning fatalities has been documented in China from 1997 to 2007 (Zhang et al, 2011) and in Australia from 1825 to 1918 (Coates et al, 1993), while a decrease in lightning deaths has been documented in the United States during the decades of 1890s and 1990s and during 1950-1991, 1959, 1959-1994and 1995(Lopez and Holle, 1995Lopez and Holle, 1996;Curran et al, 2000;Adekoya and Nolte, 2005;Holle et al, 2005); England and Wales from 1852 to 1990 (Elsom, 1993) the United Kingdom in the decades of 1870s to 1990s (Elsom, 2001); Singapore from 1922 to 1979 (Pakiam et al, 1981); Australia from 1919 through 1991 (Coates et al, 1993); China during 2008-2009(Zhang et al, 2011 and in Canada during 1999-2003 (Mills et al, 2008). Decadal fatalities were observed somewhat more frequently in 2000s compared with earlier decades.…”

“…Surprisingly, there has been little systematic collection of information on lightning deaths in many regions of the world making it difficult to estimate the global annual rates of lightning fatalities (Gomes and Kadir, 2011). The reported fatalities published in different reports, proceedings and refereed journals are from the United States (Pakiam et al, 1981;Lopez et al, 1993;Lopez and Holle, 1995, 1996, 1998Shearman and Ojala, 1999;Curran et al, 2000;Cooper, 2001;Adekoya and Nolte, 2005;Holle et al, 2005), Canada (Hornstein, 1962;Mills et al, 2006Mills et al, , 2008Mills et al, , 2010, Malawi Salerno et al, 2012), Zimbabwe (Castle and Kreft, 1974;Smith, 1991), Australia (Coates et al, 1993), the United Kingdom (Elsom, 2001), Brazil (Cardoso et al, 2014), China (Zhang et al, 2011), South Africa (Blumenthal, 2005), Swaziland (Dlamini, 2009), Colombia (Aldana et al, 2014), Spain (Aguado et al, 2000), Turkey (Tanriover and Kahraman, 2013), Singapore (Pakiam et al, 1981) and Vietnam (Holle, 2008). However, the studies pertaining to lightning fatalities over the Indian region are scanty, except for a few studies by Nizamuddin (1992), Murli Das et al (2007, 2009) and Gadge and Shrigiriwar (2013).…”

Lightning fatalities and injuries in Turkey

“…These values are more balanced than for other countries. For example, comparing the gender of lightning fatalities in the US from two data sets 100 years apart shows that the percentage of events resulting in only male fatalities was over 70 % in the 1890s, but rose to 80 % in the 1990s (Holle et al, 2005). In Canada, 84 % of all lightning fatalities (1921-2003, excluding 1950-1964) were male (Mills et al, 2008).…”

Brief communication "A multi-disciplinary approach to a side-flash lightning incident to human beings in the Basque Country"

“…The accidents related to the presence of trees may cause injuries and even fatalities. As related by Holle (2012), lightning fatality statistics related to trees have been identified in the last decades, for example by Blumenthal (2012b), Holle et al (2005), Coates et al (1993), Cardoso et al (2011), Pakiam et al (1981) and Agoris et al (2002).…”