Lightning records
Re Louis Proud’s “Human lightning rods” [ FT330:30-35], the record for lightning survival is actually an astonishing 20 hits in 16 hours, by a group of five mountaineers in July 1995. Hugo Glover, Ruaridh Pringle, and three Japanese climbers named Go, Hiro and Ozakiwere trapped in a crevice on the slopes of the Petit Dru in the Alps when they were hit by the worst storm in the area for 27 years. Lightning attracted to the crevice struck them in their tent over and over again.
“Everything turned blinding white, and then the niche was full of screaming – some of which I realised came from me,” Pringle wrote later for Reader’s Digest. “Then the niche detonated once more, and an exploding sensation tore up from the soles of my feet, seeming to exit my back. I was screaming again. My right leg felt like it was being crushed. Others were also screaming. Pain faded to numbness; groans to brittle titters, and then the niche exploded in light once more, and the screaming resumed. I began counting electrocutions to distract myself. After five, the bivouac stank of burning, and the scorched, rubber musk of humans who expected to die at any second. On the sixth, the charge ripping through my body was so strong that I passed out.”
The last three hits came as they were abseiling across towards a hut shelter, but they finally made it. Seven more parties had to be rescued by helicopter, a man was killed by lightning at the Chamonix cable car station, and three more died in the mountains nearby. But Roy Sullivan’s record had been well and truly shattered.
About 80 per cent of people struck by lightning survive. The most famous case was Lee Trevino, struck along with two fellow professional golfers, who quipped later: “Always carry a one iron. Even God can’t hit a one iron.”
The record for the largest number of people killed by one bolt is 21 in 1975, at Umtali in what is now Zimbabwe, although larger losses of life have resulted from lighting causing plane crashes and explosions. The most famous deaths were two Thai women killed in Hyde Park in London by a bolt that struck their underwired bras. Trevor Hart Woodbridge, Suffolk