NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS SR-193, Section 13 to end
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 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 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.
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 on 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.
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 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.
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FIGURE 4. US map of number of lightning deaths by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 5. US map of lightning deaths ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 6. US map of number of lightning injuries by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 7. US map of lightning injuries ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 8. US map of number of lightning damage reports by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 9. US map of lightning damage reports ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 10. US map of average population ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 13. US map of rates of lightning deaths ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 14. US map of rates of lightning injuries ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 15. US map of rates of lightning damage reports ranked by state from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 17. Ratio of the number of lightning injuries to deaths by year from 1959 to 1994 for the US.
FIGURE 18. Number of lightning damage reports by year from 1959 to 1994 for the US.
FIGURE 19. Number of reported US lightning casualties and damage reports by decade.
FIGURE 20. Population-weighted US lightning casualties and damage reports by decade.
FIGURE 21. US regions for analysis of Storm Data entries.
FIGURE 24. Decadal variations of lightning casualties and damages by state.
FIGURE 25. Decadal variations of the rates of lightning casualties and damages by state.
FIGURE 28. Monthly variations of lightning casualties and damage reports by region of the US (%).
FIGURE 29. Seasonal variations of lightning casualties and damage reports by state.
FIGURE 36. Number of US lightning deaths, injuries, and casualties per event from 1959 to 1994.
FIGURE 37. Gender of US lightning deaths from 1959 to 1994 including unknown cases.
FIGURE 38. Gender of US lightning deaths from 1959 to 1994 without unknown cases.
FIGURE 39. Locations of US lightning casualties from 1959 to 1994 including unknown cases.
FIGURE 40. Number of lightning damage reports by year from 1959 to 1994 in the US.