Lightning fatalities in China, 2009-2018

The statistical characteristics of 1789 deaths, 1552 injuries and 1904 disasters caused by lightning based on the 2009 to 2018 National Lightning Disaster Compilation of mainland China were analyzed. The results showed that males accounted for 53% of casualties. Lightning disasters were more common in the east and south than in the west and north. The number of lightning disasters and casualties in the south accounted for 82.98% and 82.94% of the totals, respectively. May to August of each year is the intensive period of lightning disasters in China, and the number of deaths, injuries and disasters caused by lightning during these four months accounted for 84.80%, 79.45% and 82.77% of the total numbers per year, respectively. From 2009 to 2018, the annual injury and death rates per million people in China were 0.13 and 0.12, respectively. After population weighting, the high death rate of lightning disaster shows a certain trend of transferring from the concentrated area to the sparsely populated area, after area weighting, the casualty density was higher in small provinces and lower in large provinces. The analysis of the environments in which lightning disaster casualties occurred found that environments closely related to agriculture, such as farmland (35%) and paddy fields or ponds (4%), accounted for nearly 40% of the casualties; accordingly, rural farmers were the main victims, accounting for 80.96% of the total casualties. Lightning protection and disaster reduction measures in rural agricultural areas should be the focus of future work.