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23 August 2024

Climate Change’s Latest Deadly Threat: Lightning Strikes

Monika Mondal

Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination. Sometimes he travels alone, other times with a team of five or six from the organization he volunteers for, the Lightning Resilient India Campaign. It’s a task he is undertaking increasingly often.

Last month, he rode to meet the Manjhi family, who lost an 8-year-old boy, Viresh, and his mother, Subodhra, after a tea stall they were sheltering under was struck during a storm. A lightning bolt can generate temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun, with a voltage millions of times higher than a household socket. If it connects with a human, it can stop the heart and respiratory system, damage the brain and nervous system, leave major burns, and cause blunt trauma if victims are flung by the force of being struck. On the day the Manjhis died, lightning also killed another person in the village and injured five others.

Each year, an estimated 24,000 people worldwide are killed by lightning. While a significant number, deaths per head of population have fallen sharply over the past two centuries, thanks largely due to urbanization, the protection of more substantial housing, and improved weather forecasting. But India’s large rural population remains badly affected. Between 2,000 and 3,000 Indians die annually by lightning, most of them working class people aged 10 to 50. Fatalities have risen by more than 50 percent since the turn of the century, outstripping population growth. Compare that to the US, where fatalities have been gradually falling and number around 20 a year. India can experience more than that number of deaths in a day.

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