With Summer Comes Lightning Season--Will You Be In for a Shock? : Nature: Up to 300 people in the United States are killed by the phenomenon each year. Safest bet: Head for cover.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. —  This is the season when nature gets angry in a very random and violent way. At any given moment around the world there are more than a thousand storms, and those storms give birth to lightning. And lightning kills.

In fact, in the United States, 100 to 300 people are killed by lightning each year, making it one of the weather’s worst killers. Although figures vary, the number of Americans injured each year may run as high as 1,500.

Lightning starts about 10,000 forest fires a year in this country alone.

On average, every commercial airliner is struck in flight at least once a year.

Although lightning strikes are fatal in fewer than one in three cases, people who have been hit are not likely to treat it lightly again.

John Durocher was 30 feet away huddled under a tree when a lightning bolt killed his identical twin on a golf course fairway.

“Paul was swinging with an iron when it hit us,” says Durocher, 29, of Waterford, Mich. “I was in a coma for 18 hours afterward and don’t remember much about it. The hard part was losing my twin. It was like losing a part of me.”

Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, a lightning expert and associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois-Chicago, says as many as 300 Americans die by lightning each year, although the National Safety Council says the average toll is closer to 100.

Most lightning deaths occur from May through September, when thunderstorms are most frequent, and during the day, when more people are outdoors.

Open areas, such as golf courses, are especially vulnerable. A lightning stroke killed one and injured five others huddled beneath a lone willow near the 11th tee during the opening round of this year’s U. S. Open in Chaska, Minn. in June.

Lightning nearly killed professional golfer Lee Trevino during the Western Open near Chicago in 1975. A strike flashed off a lake, traveled up the shafts of his clubs and hit him in the shoulder.

About 70% of the people who get hit by lightning live to tell about their experiences, though many suffer lingering aftereffects, according to Cooper.

“Superheated air from lightning can turn the sweat on your body to steam, blast off your clothes and literally knock your socks off,” says Dr. John Prescott, director of emergency medical services at West Virginia University Hospitals in Morgantown.

Prescott, a former military emergency physician at Ft. Bragg, N. C., has treated about 150 lightning-strike survivors, more than most doctors see during a career. Heart failure kills most lightning-strike victims, Prescott says.

“I’d say you’re not going to die from a lightning strike unless you go into cardiac arrest,” he said.

Even if a bolt isn’t fatal, the millions or billions of volts in a single strike can cook nerves and blood vessels, damage the brain, cause cataracts, rupture eardrums, break bones and sizzle skin--all in under a second.

“It literally can affect every organ in the body,” Prescott says.

It also can produce some strange side effects.

Edwin Robinson, 73, of Falmouth, Me., who gradually lost his sight and hearing after his truck jackknifed and crashed through a guard rail in 1971, claims he saw the light again after being zapped by lightning in his yard in 1980.

“Before I got struck, the doctors told me I would never see or hear again,” Robinson says. “A day after it happened they said I had perfect eyesight and perfect hearing.”

Doctors had been at a loss to explain Robinson’s fading sight and diminished hearing. Several physicians questioned by a Boston newspaper a month after Robinson regained his senses said he exhibited classic symptoms of hysterical blindness and deafness.

The victims of hysterical reactions are not faking, but there is no apparent physical cause for their condition.

Keith Dalton temporarily lost the use of his left leg when he and 23 other members of the Kingwood Pike Coon Hunters Club were walloped by a bolt as they crouched under a steel-roofed pavilion during a thunderstorm.

“I was hanging from a beam when the next thing I knew the lightning picked up my feet and pulled me up toward the roof,” says Dalton, a 24-year-old welder from Morgantown.

“It was all lit up,” he says. “It looked like a spark plug coming off the roof and going through everybody’s heads. Everyone had blue sparks coming from them. It was really something to see.”

After the strike, Dalton thought his companions, most of whom lay moaning on the ground, were dying.

“It seemed to take a long time, but it was really only a second,” Dalton says. “One guy was choking on his chewing tobacco and turned black.”

All 24 lived. Only one was admitted to a hospital overnight for observation.

“It kind of felt like you were in a microwave,” Dalton says. “You got real warm inside. All I wanted to do was drink water afterward.”

Durocher and other lightning survivors shared their fears at a recent conference in Maggie Valley, N. C., sponsored by Dr. Gerolf Engelstatter, a psychologist, and Steve Marshburn, who founded a support group for lightning victims.

“One of the things we found was that most victims are isolated and afraid to talk about what happened to them for the first three or four years after the incident,” says Cooper, who, along with Prescott, counseled those at the meeting.

“I don’t know if it’s the fear of being ridiculed or what.”

Cooper says common symptoms among lightning survivors include memory loss, complaints stemming from damage to the central nervous system, and muscle aches and pains.

Several people at the conference said summer heat has troubled them since they were struck. Harold Deal, 53, an electrician from Lawton, Mo., said he hasn’t worn a jacket in 22 years.

“Even when the thermometer shows minus 26 degrees, I just wear a T-shirt and overalls,” says Deal, who bounced off his neighbor’s house after being tossed 48 feet by a lightning strike on July 26, 1969.

“When it’s 80 degrees outside, it feels like 110 or 115 to me,” Deal said. “I have to keep ice on my back and neck. Otherwise, I pass out from the heat.”

Others, like Dalton, had a nearly insatiable thirst immediately after they were hit.

“People told us they can’t sleep or they still have muscle twitching in their bodies,” Prescott says. “There were a lot of neurological problems among them, funny sensations in their legs and arms. Nearly everyone complained about leg cramps at night.”

Most survivors remember little about the actual strike. Those who do describe being forced to the ground, being hit a blow, tossed through the air or hearing a sharp crack.

Lightning was viewed with awe by ancient peoples who attached religious and meteorological significance to the frightening flashes. The Greeks began to depict lightning bolts in mythology as Zeus’s tools of warning and vengeance around 700 BC.

Aristotle said lightning was the ignition of fumes that made storm clouds. In Africa, the Basuto tribe depicts lightning as the great thunderbird, Umpundulo, that flashes its wings as it dives to the Earth, according to Cooper’s research.

Benjamin Franklin’s daring experiments in the mid-1700s proved that lightning was an electric phenomenon and that clouds carry charges. He invented the lightning rod and described its use in a 1753 article published in “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

Lightning results from friction generated by swift, warm updrafts within storm clouds that create layers of differently charged particles. The upper portion of the cloud tends to become positively charged while the lower becomes negative.

A relatively weak leader stroke from the cloud to the ground initiates the lightning flash when the charges within the cloud are strong enough to overcome the insulating qualities of air.

As the leader stroke nears the earth, a pilot stroke rises from the ground to complete the pathway of superheated ions. A return stroke, which carries most of the electric current, then rises from the ground to the cloud causing a bright flash as huge amounts of energy are discharged.

Although the ground stroke is brighter, lightning is perceived as coming from the sky because of the relative weakness of the irregular, slower leader stroke.

Flashes also can occur from cloud to cloud and from tall buildings or mountains to clouds.

“Not every storm has lightning,” says William Read, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office in Silver Spring, Md. “You have to have strong vertical motions to get that and a lot of rainstorms don’t develop those.”

Scientists have attributed thunder to shock waves stemming from the explosive expansion of air superheated to 8,000 degrees Celsius by lightning flashes packing 10 million to 2 billion volts.

Lightning is neither the direct current discharged by batteries nor alternating current used in households, but strong surges of electromagnetic energy.

Although the chances of getting hit by lightning are slim, Cooper says it makes good sense to stay indoors during electrical storms or to stay low and away from tall trees or metal objects if outside.

Unplugging appliances and avoiding the telephone and bathroom during lightning storms will decrease the chance of getting injured by lightning that follows pipes and wires into a home.

Cooper says she doesn’t worry about taking such precautions.

“I don’t unplug anything,” she says. “I just sit out on my balcony with a glass of Jack Daniel’s and watch nature’s fireworks.”