Lightning’s Deadly Hotspots: The Countries Where Strikes Kill Most
According to NASA, lightning strikes Earth around 1.4 billion times a year.
With 1.4 billion strikes and 8 billion of us wandering around the place a few hits would seem inevitable. And so it is. Lighting does strike a lot of people each year.
For the the vast majority of us the idea of being struck by lightning seems so remote as to be a joke. Storms are occasional, lightning storms rare and even when they do happen you just stay indoors. It’s a different story in say Kampala, Uganda where there are an average 280 thunderstorm days each year.
Spend more than a year in certain countries, and the stats say you’re a better than 1 in a million chance to be struck and killed by lightning.
The countries where lightning strikes (and kills) people most
India is where most people get struck by lighting, with around 5,000 recorded incidents each year. And the survival rate, at just over 50% isn’t great. By comparison, around 90% of those struck in Australia survive to tell the tale.
India’s heavily populated neighbours China and Bangladesh also top the chart for number of reported incidents each year. Much smaller (by population) Cambodia and Nepal round the top 5.
Countries with the highest fatality rates from lightning strikes
There are 18 countries in the world where your chances of being struck and killed by lighting are better than 1 in a million, assuming you spend an entire year in one of these countries living as the locals do.
For all of these countries a simple calculation of lightning related fatalities in an average year, divided by the population, comes in at a number greater than 1/1,000,000. Sometimes substantially so!
Bhutan is a clear standout with an annual lightning-related fatality rate of 31 per million which isn’t that remote! Expressed as a 1 in 30,000 chance doesn’t make it seem any better. Centenarians of Bhutan have escaped a 1/300 lifetime chance of being hit.
Residents of Bhutan, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Malawi, and South Africa all have a greater than 5 in 1 million chance of dying from a lighting strike in any given year. In Cambodia, lightning kills more people each year than floods. And floods are not uncommon.
The countries with the highest lightning fatality rates are depicted in the below bubble chart. The bigger the bubble, the higher the rate. Countries along the equator and the high Himalayas are well represented.
Lightning strike data
Thanks to NASA, accurate data on where, when and how often lighting strikes is readily available. But when it comes to how often those strikes hit, injure or kill a person, the data becomes very incomplete. Only a handful countries record and publish reliable information.
For most countries, especially those far from the tropics, relatively few strikes probably makes it a non-issue. But for some, information is conspicuously absent.
Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela has the highest lightning density in the world with 250 strikes per square kilometre per year. Kifuka village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo comes in second with 232. Bhutan has more lightning related deaths per capita than any other country in the world.
But very few countries, including the aforementioned hotspots, systematically track non-fatal lightning related incidents. Even fatal incident data is rubbery at times, with numbers coming from reported estimates.
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