About 90 Percent of People Struck by Lightning Survive

Being struck by lightning sounds like certain death. The U.S. National Weather Service says it usually is not. Only about 10 percent of people who are struck by lightning are killed. That is no reason to take it lightly, because the same sentence continues that the other 90 percent are left with various degrees of disability. A strike can cause cardiac arrest, the heart stopping, at the time of the injury. The Weather Service also gives the scale of the danger in the United States. Over the 30 years from 1989 to 2018, the country averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year. In the last 10 years of that period, from 2009 to 2018, the average was lower, at 27 lightning fatalities a year.