Deadly lightning strike in Mexico reveals plight of poorest citizens

It was mid-afternoon when a huge boom of thunder startled the Ramírez family as they tended their maize crops in the tiny mountainous community of El Encinal, in Mexico’s central state of Guanajuato.

The family, four adult sisters and their five children, sought shelter from the sudden torrential downpour under a squat mesquite tree – and it was there, as they covered their heads with flimsy sheets of plastic, that they were struck by lightning.

Three of the women and four children died in the lightning strike last Friday. The other two, an eight-year-old boy and 26-year-old woman survived with burns.

Mexico has the worst lightning death rate in the Americas with an average of 220 fatalities a year. The vast majority of victims are poor small-scale farmers who have no access to safe, sturdy buildings or hard topped vehicles during a storm, and are ignorant of the dangers posed by sheltering under trees and flimsy rain shelters.

Lightning kills between 6,000 and 24,000 people worldwide each year. Multiple deaths, like the case of the Ramírez family, attract media attention but 90% of cases are single deaths which are rarely reported, making them difficult to track.

The highest death tolls occur in the poorest African and Asian countries where large sections of the population work outside as subsistence farmers, and live in simple homes which can catch fire if struck by a lightning bolt.

In Malawi, the annual death rate is 84 per million people, compared to 2.7 per million in Mexico and 0.3 per million in the US. In India, 2,500 died from lightning strikes last year.

“Fatalities largely depend on socio-economic factors and not the frequency of lightning strikes,” said Ronald Holle, a global lightning expert at Vaisala Inc in Arizona.

“Most fatalities occur where people don’t have a safe place to go day or night. They work all day in labour intensive agriculture, and at night go home to thatched roof or adobe houses with no metal, plumbing or wiring to provide a safe path for the lightning.”

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In Mexico, at least 7,300 people were killed by lightning strikes between 1979 and 2011, according to the first ever national study published last year. It is a country prone to seasonal tropical thunderstorms, and the majority of deaths happened in the first half of the rainy season, between June and August. Boys aged 10 to 19 were the most common victims as they generally spent more time outdoors working and playing football.

Almost two-thirds of the deaths occurred in seven of the country’s 32 states. The state of Mexico, known as Edomex in Spanish, has suffered most fatalities, while Guanajuato has the fourth highest death rate.

In Edomex, researchers were able to pinpoint most deaths to 11 of the 125 municipalities [counties] where the majority of people eke out a living through farming.

Here, there was a high concentration of indigenous communities and low formal education levels, with a greater susceptibility to myths and folklores about supernatural aspects of natural phenomena.

The large number of deaths in Mexico cannot be explained by the amount of lightning, but by the government’s failure to implement education and prevention strategies in communities living and working in vulnerable conditions, the study found.

“Having cars or buses near fields where people could wait out storms would do the job. Rain shelters are death traps; they are utterly useless at protecting people,” said Holle.

Vaisala’s real-time global lightning detection network, which is based on concepts originally developed at the University of Arizona and Stanford University, currently captures 1.5 million to 4 million lightning strokes each day of the year.

The data has helped prove that fatalities and injuries are largely down to preventable factors rather than the quantity of lightning strikes.

In the developed world, the death rate from lightning has dropped substantially.

In the US, annual lightning deaths have fallen from 400 in the 1930s to around 30 today despite a growing population. This is down to a move from small-scale manual farming to large farms operating with lightning-safe machinery, medical advances in CPR, changes in telephone technology and public awareness campaigns, according to John Jensenius, lightning specialist at US National Weather Service.

“In countries like Mexico, deaths are still about people having to spend a lot of time outside for their livelihoods. In the US, deaths are now mainly linked to people doing leisure activities like hiking, climbing and fishing, which makes them vulnerable during a storm.”

In Africa, lightning strikes which hit ramshackle schools account for hundreds of child deaths each year, according to the African Centres for Lightning and Electromagnetics.

The network is trying to raise money to install lightning rods – invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century – in African schools which would carry lightning safely into the ground.

It’s not just about preventing deaths – 10 times as many people are injured each year. A strike typically shoots 200 to 300 million volts of electricity through the body, compared with 120 volts from a normal household appliance. Injuries are predominantly neurological, caused by the heart stopping and a lack of oxygen to the brain, and range from short-term headaches and numbness to permanent paralysis.

Holle said: “It is entirely possible to protect people from lightning. It all boils down to economics.”