Being Struck By Lightning – the Stories

A little tip: don’t be playing golf in the middle of July, on a weekend, between midday and 6pm, if there are dark clouds overhead. If you find yourself in that situation, don’t hide under the nearest tree. If it starts raining, throw your golf club as far away as possible and, while still standing, bend over and grab your ankles. Then wait until you can’t hear thunder anymore.

Now that is something pretty cool coming from the sky…

If, while the blood rushes to your head, you feel a bit silly, spare a thought for the late Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a man who endured seven lightning strikes during his tenure as a forest ranger at Shenandoah National Park. The first was while manning a lookout tower in 1942, when he lost a nail on his big toe. More about Roy later.
A summer weekend playing golf might statistically be the most likely time and place to get struck by lightning, but what are the effects?

The idea of sticking your arse in the air has a practical application: lightning seeks the shortest path between the sky and the ground. If you are stood up straight, this path most likely passes through your heart. With lightning travelling at up to 220,000 km/h and conducting up to 3,000,000 W per metre, in the process generating a temperature of 20,000 °C (about three times that of the surface of the Sun) and allowing Marty McFly to travel back to the future, it makes sense to protect your heart. Also, being able to say you took a lightning bolt up the arse is a pub story to end all pub stories. Roy had a few of those doozies, such as when he was struck in 1969 while driving his truck, knocking him unconscious and singeing his eyebrows.

You would look even worse than him!

Taking a bolt up the chuff is a mere footnote in the compendium of extraordinary lightning stories. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA and an acknowledged bonkers trailblazer, proposed in 1750 an experiment to prove that lightning was electricity by flying a kite in a storm with a key tied to the end of the string. While the tale of Franklin actually flying the damn thing may well be apocryphal, it’s that kind of crazy thinking that led to sub-prime mortgaging. It’s also the kind of thinking that resulted in Roy being struck in his left shoulder while in his front yard in 1970.

However, that’s peanuts compared to an incident in the Church of St. Nazaire in Brescia, Italy in 1769, where a bolt of lightning struck the church and happened to ignite 100 tons – yes, One Hundred Tons – of gunpowder, obliterating the church and decimating one sixth of the entire city. An unprecedented 3000 people lost their lives, though Sundays were freed up for the remainder of the century. A more contemporary account of lightning as tragedy was the loss of 31 Jersey cows killed in Jutland, Denmark. The cows had sought shelter under a tree but had neglected to stick their arses in the air. Kurt Nielsen, the owner of the cows, was quoted as saying in a rather heartbreaking fashion, ‘When I went out to the barn to milk the remaining cows the tears came.’ Damn that lightning. A phrase Roy was undoubtedly saying when he took a blazing bullet for the fourth time in 1972 while at the ranger station. It set fire to his hair. After this one he carried a pitcher of water with him and began to develop a complex about some higher power with a vendetta.

Poor cow…

Roy did not bogart the lightning though. In 2007, lightning struck a remote village in northwestern Pakistan, killing 30 people. If this had happened in the middle of London, or Paris, or New York, it would have been an extraordinary media bollock-fest where rolling news would confirm that ‘confirmed reports’ of lightning had been ‘confirmed’ while stock footage of non-descript farmland being struck by lightning rolled in an interminable loop. Because it was in Pakistan, it got this incredibly detailed store on the Reuters website. Roy must have been wondering why he hadn’t got the news coverage he was surely owed when, not one year after the last time he got struck by lightning, he was mullered for a fifth time, on August 7th, 1973. This time it hit him on the head, blasting him out of his car and, you guessed it, setting his hair on fire. This helpful picture of Roy will go a long way to describing the results of these last two strikes, as well as his direct relationship with lightning.

Hi Roy. Is your favourite film Return of the Jedi?

The study of lightning strikes on people is referred to as Keraunomedicine. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is more prone/susceptible to lightning strikes, though park rangers and golf players are statistically the most at risk. Speaking of which, you may have heard of a man called Roy Cleveland Sullivan. I was unable to find out whether he was an avid golf player or not, but the sixth time he got struck by lightning on June 5th, 1976, he was starting to get wise to his lot in life and tried to outrun the storm cloud that eventually struck him in a campground, injuring his ankle. Unsurprisingly, this day coincided with Oxford English Dictionary records of Sullivan coining his sixth new swear word.

It can strike more than twice…

Offensive neologisms aside, it might comfort you ladies to know it’s the blokes who get it bad, with 83% of all lightning strikes sustained by blokes. 82% of these strikes were sustained by one Roy Sullivan, a man who we have established as by far the most legendary lightning-related human being to walk the recorded Earth. Blessed with the kind of luck normally reserved for over-ambitious Lemmings, Roy took his final shock on June 25th, 1977. The final bolt hit him while he was fishing. He was hospitalized for burns to his chest and stomach.

So how did Roy die? In 1983, the New York Times published this obituary:

‘Roy Sullivan, a retired Shenandoah National Park ranger who was struck by lightning seven times and survived, died Wednesday of a gunshot wound. He was 71 years old.’

In the end, the Human Lightning Conductor took his own life, allegedly distraught over an unrequited love. Ironically, on all seven occasions during his incredible four decades of being plugged into nature’s mains, the lightning had missed his heart.

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