The most common situation is for one lightning victim to be involved in an incident when at least one person was killed or injured. Tables 30 and 31 and Figure 36 show the number of people per event by category.

For incidents involving deaths only, 91% of the cases had one fatality. Another 8% of the events had two people killed in the same incident. One event had more than eight people killed (Figure 36 and Table 31) when 81 people were killed in a Maryland airliner crash in December 1963 (sections 5B and 6A).

For incidents involving injuries only, 68% of the cases had one injury, which is a lower rate than for deaths. The largest number of injuries involved 90 people at a campground in Michigan (section 3C) as reported by Ferrett and Ojala (1992). The distributions of casualty events in the figure and both tables closely resemble the injury distributions.

The same tendency for single victims has been noted with other datasets:

• US, 1959 to 1965 Of the fatalities, 70% occurred singly (Zegel, 1967).
• Singapore, 1922 to 1979 One person was involved in 85% of the deaths (Pakiam et al., 1981).
• Australia, 1824 to 1991 Of the deaths, 92% occurred singly (Coates et al., 1993).
• Colorado, 1950 to 1991 Only one person was involved in 89% of the deaths, 70% of injuries, and 66% of the casualties (López et al., 1995).

In summary, lightning usually kills people one at a time, while there is more than one person involved in quite a few injury events. The dominance of single-person events shows the need for lightning safety education so that people take personal responsibility for their own threat from lightning.