[Table of Contents]

3. DEATHS, INJURIES, AND PROPERTY DAMAGES IN THE 1890s

A. OVERVIEW

The distributions of Rural and Urban lightning casualties in Kretzer (1895) are shown in Table 3 and Figure 1. There were three times as many deaths in Rural (47% ) as in Urban settings (15%), as shown in Figure 2. However, injuries were about the same (24 and 25%) in both settings. The resulting category of casualties - deaths and injuries combined - is also shown in Figure 1.

It is likely that fatalities were reported in Kretzer (1895) more often than injuries for several reasons:

•Kretzer (1895) had less than two injuries for each lightning fatality (Table 3). Curran et al. (1997) showed the ratio in Storm Data to have been two injuries per death in 1959, then the ratio steadily increased to 8:1 in 1994.

•Cherington et al. (1999) used data from newly-automated medical reporting systems to find a ratio of 10:1.

•Deaths were 47% of the total in Rural incidents (Table 3). In contrast, deaths were only 15% of the total in Urban incidents. Many lightning deaths that actually occurred may have been covered in newspapers in both rural and urban areas. But an injury in a rural situation may have been less likely to be reported than an injury in a city.

•Injuries continue to be underreported more often than deaths in recent years (section 2C).

FIGURE 1. Rural, Urban, and Unknown lightning deaths, injuries, and casualties from 1891 to 1894.

It was not possible to specify the Urban-Rural setting in nearly half of the cases in Table 3 and Figure 1. Also, fatalities are likely to be a better dataset than injuries for reasons given above. For these reasons, the fatality difference without the Unknown settings is shown in Figure 2. Rural deaths in the 1890s are then shown to be three times as frequent as urban deaths.

FIGURE 2. Rural versus Urban lightning-related deaths from 1891 to 1894, without Unknown cases.

Incident types for the 1890s are shown in Figure 3 and Table 4. It is readily apparent that Indoors is the largest category for deaths and especially injuries. Outdoors is second most common for both deaths and injuries, and next is Agriculture. Recreation and Sports incidents were infrequent in the 1890s.

FIGURE 3. Type of incident of lightning-related deaths and injuries from 1891 to 1894.

The 1890s dataset is divided both by setting and type of incident in Figure 4 and Table 5. Comparison of settings shows the following:

Rural

Agriculture incidents are the most common type of lightning deaths in Rural settings, and nearly the highest for injuries. Rural settings also have nearly as many Outdoors as well as Indoors incidents.

Urban

Indoors incidents account for half of all Urban lightning deaths and injuries, and Outdoors is second.

Unknown

Most settings that could not be identified involved Indoors incidents.

Comparison of type of incident in Figure 4 and Table 5 shows the following:

Agriculture

Virtually all Agriculture incidents occurred in Rural settings, as expected. Agriculture has a larger number of deaths than any other category.

Indoors

Indoors deaths and injuries are very frequent in both Rural and Urban settings.

Outdoors

Outdoors victims account for a significant portion of victims in all settings.

Recreation

Few lightning deaths or injuries occurred during outdoor Recreation in the 1890s.

Small structures

Almost no such incidents occurred in this category.

Sports

There were a few Sports incidents in both Rural and Unknown settings.

Unknown

This is a sizable type throughout the dataset, since it was decided for this study to include only clearly-defined cases.

FIGURE 4. Type of incident of lightning-related deaths and injuries from 1891 to 1894 distributed by setting.

Next: Chapter 3, Section B: 1890s casualties by type of incident