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

Fatalities
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.

Injuries
The largest numbers of injuries are on 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 An unpublished study for Colorado by the authors showed more recreational casualties on weekend days and holidays than on weekdays, while employment cases occurred more often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damage reports on weekdays is difficult to understand, but could result from variations in reporting by newspapers that do not publish every day.

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