Q&A: Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice
Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice
Question
I happened to read about “Roy Sullivan,” a man who was struck by lightning 7 times over the course of 70 years of his life. The cases were well documented.
For some reason I couldn’t find anyone bothered by how extremely improbable this story is. According to Wikipedia, the chance of being struck—one single incident—is one in 10,000. There’s no source for that number, and it seems a bit strange to me—does that mean worldwide or in Virginia? I don’t know. According to another source (the Digitok website), the probability is one in a million. Either way, it’s either 10,000^7 or 1,000,000^7, both of which are implausible on an unimaginable scale (one in a nonillion—whatever that means).
Even assuming a hundred quadrillion human beings, it still doesn’t come close to scraping the bottom of any kind of probability, even the most far-fetched.
Maybe lightning has some kind of tendency to be attracted to certain people, I don’t know. But I haven’t seen anyone going in that direction; it’s just somehow treated as a nice, believable record.
He lived in a storm-heavy area and worked in a park, but some of the strikes happened in a different area altogether.
I’m not knowledgeable in statistics, and I don’t know whether you’re the right person to ask: do you have an explanation for this?
Answer
You’d need to know the details in order to think of an explanation.
Discussion on Answer
Yehonatan,
I read Wikipedia. And as I said: (a) the statistical data there has no source, and it’s obvious that the 1-in-10,000 figure isn’t global. The question is whether it’s specifically for Virginia—in which case it’s more reasonable (by the way, that refers to a lifetime period of 80 years, and he lived 70). In another source I saw a statistic of 1 in 1,000,000, which sounds more correct globally.
(b) In any case, either way, the odds are tiny to the point of nonexistence. Even if you were to imagine the odds were 1 in 1,000 (which is of course totally absurd), there would still be no real plausibility to this case. As mentioned later in the quote: throughout the entire U.S. in that same period only about 16,000 people were struck by lightning (some of them presumably by the same bolt—as can be seen from the most recent lightning strike that hit Peru).
(c) Not all the lightning strikes happened to him in Virginia.
(d) If his place of residence is the explanation, then there should have been at least some number of people around him who were struck 5 times, 3 times, and so on. There’s just no plausibility in a situation where out of the millions in Virginia, some number of people were struck once, and one person was struck seven times.
From Wikipedia:
The probability of a person being struck by lightning over a period of 80 years is estimated at 1:10,000. If lightning strikes are independent events, then the probability of being struck 7 times is 1 in 10,000 to the 7th power. These figures are not correct in Sullivan’s case, since as a forest ranger he was present more often in open areas. In Virginia, where he lived, between 35 and 45 thunderstorms occur per day in certain months, most of them during June, July, and August. Between 1959 and 2000, lightning strikes caused the deaths of 58 people and injured at least 238 people in Virginia. Across the United States, 3,239 people were killed by lightning strikes and 13,057 were injured to one degree or another by lightning during that same period. The vast majority were men aged 20 to 40 who were in open areas.