Lightning casualties and damages in China from 1997 to 2009

Abstract

Lightning-related fatalities, injuries and property damages reported in China from 1997 to 2009 are summarized by using the National Lightning Hazards Database. Therefore, characteristics of the incidents including 5,033 deaths, 4,670 injuries and 61,614 damage reports are analyzed. For the spatial distribution of lightning disasters in China, the eastern costal and southern areas have more frequent lightning disasters than the western areas. Lightning disasters mainly occur in summer months from July to September, while fewer damages occur in winter months from October to March, which correlate significantly with the temporal variability of lightning frequency in China. Lightning-related casualties and damages in China have increased for the period of 1997 to 2007 and then began to decrease since 2008. The national fatalities and injuries per million people per year are 0.31 and 0.28, respectively. Rural people account for 51 and 29% of all lightning fatalities and injuries, which makes residents in agricultural and rural area the major lightning victims. Characteristics of lightning disasters and correlative factors are also studied, including hazard-affected industries and locations. The results show that civil industry has the worst property loss and farmland is the largest category in lightningcaused casualty locations.

Lightning fatalities over India: 1979–2011

“…However, when taking the fatality rate per million population into account, the maximum shift from highly populated states to less populated states was not observed in India. These results were not in agreement with the similar studies carried out in the United States and China (Curran et al, 2000;Zhang et al, 2011). The number of lightning fatalities, normalized by population, varies from year to year with an average rate of 0.25 per million people per year for the 33 year period.…”

“…Apart from rate per million people and rank, the lightning fatalities were also normalized by area of the respective unit (state) to know the density of lightning fatalities. Furthermore, the state fatalities were mapped separately (Curran et al, 2000;Dlamini, 2009;Zhang et al, 2011).…”

“…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).…”

“…A total of 5259 fatalities was observed as a result of lightning strikes. The average fatalities per year in India is 159 from 1979 to 2011, while this number in China is 387 during the period 1997-2009 (Zhang et al, 2011) and 90 in the United States during 1959-1994 (Curran et al, 2000). Interestingly, lightning-related fatalities in India are more than twice lower than in China and almost twice higher than in the United States.…”

Discussion on the Detection Method of Lightning Protection of Expressway Toll Station

“…Expressway toll station contains the communication, monitoring, charging and ventilation lighting system, these electrical and electronic systems constitute a powerful expressway mechanical and electrical systems. Especially the expressway electromechanical system without lightning protection facilities or facilities are not perfect caused the lightning invasion accidents and economic losses [2,3]. With the development of intelligent transportation, electronic devices are widely used and the degree of integration continues to improve, the harm degree of lightning on expressway electronic equipment will also increase.…”