Lightning strike survival: what happens when a person is struck

01

How do most people get struck by lightning?[1]

Direct strikes are the minority. Most casualties come from ground current spreading outward through soil, side flashes jumping from a nearby struck object, and contact with conducting paths such as plumbing or wired equipment.

United States records give a sense of scale. The National Weather Service counted 444 lightning deaths from 2006 through 2021, an average of about 28 a year, and roughly 80% of those killed were male. Fishing was the single most common activity at the time of a fatal strike.

The odds are longer than most people assume. For a US resident, the chance of being struck in a given year is about 1 in 1.2 million, and the lifetime chance is about 1 in 15,000. Behavior during storms moves those odds enormously in both directions.

Ground current

the largest cause of casualties. Current spreads through soil from the strike point

Side flash

current jumps from a struck tree or pole to a person sheltering nearby

Contact injury

touching plumbing, a corded phone or wired equipment during a strike

Direct strike

the rarest mechanism, but the most often imagined

Upward streamer

a person's body launches its own upward discharge that fails to connect, yet still carries current

02

Why do most people survive a lightning strike?[2]

Mainly because the contact is so brief. A return stroke lasts tens of microseconds, and much of the current travels over the skin rather than through the body, an effect called flashover. That is long enough to stop a heart but usually too short to destroy internal tissue the way sustained contact with a power line does.

This is the basic difference from industrial electrocution, where current flows for as long as contact lasts. Lightning injuries usually look less like deep burns and more like an insult to the nervous system: stopped breathing, confusion, memory gaps and temporary paralysis.

The paralysis has its own name, keraunoparalysis. Limbs turn cold, blue and pulseless for minutes to hours after the strike, then usually recover without treatment. The blast wave also ruptures eardrums in a large share of victims, so someone who seems unresponsive may simply be unable to hear you.

03

Why is cardiac arrest the main risk?[2]

A lightning current can momentarily stop the heart. The heart often restarts on its own, but the respiratory center in the brain can stay paralysed for longer, so breathing fails to resume and a second arrest follows from lack of oxygen.

This is why rescue breathing matters so much in lightning casualties, and why prompt CPR has an unusually high success rate compared with other cardiac arrests.

Lightning victims retain no electrical charge whatsoever. Hesitating to touch someone is a genuine cause of preventable deaths.

04

What should you do if someone is struck by lightning?[2]

Call emergency services, then start CPR straight away if the person is not breathing normally. Victims carry no charge and are completely safe to touch. If the storm is still overhead, move them to shelter first, because the same area can absolutely be struck again.

Lightning inverts normal triage. At most accident scenes, rescuers pass over people who appear dead to help those who can still be saved. After a strike it is the apparently dead who should be treated first, since their hearts and breathing can often be restarted, while the conscious victims will usually keep breathing on their own.

05

What are the long-term effects?[2]

Survivors frequently report lasting neurological symptoms rather than dramatic burns. Chronic pain, memory difficulty, sleep disruption, irritability and attention problems are common, and can persist for years after the visible injuries have healed.

The distinctive branching skin marks sometimes seen after a strike, called Lichtenberg figures, are not burns. They fade within hours to days and are thought to result from small vessels rupturing beneath the skin.

Cataracts are a recognized delayed effect and can develop months after the strike, so survivors are usually advised to have an eye examination even when their vision seems fine at first.