What are the odds of being a lightning victim?
With about 1,000 lightning injuries and deaths each year in the United States and a population of about 240 million, your the odds are 1 in 240,000 each year. Over an 80-year lifetime, your chance of being a lightning victim during your life is 1 in 3,000. You have a about a 1 in 300 chance of being affected by a lightning death or injury of a close friend or a relative. Now, buildings and utility poles are a different story – and these are the primary conduits for losing valuable electronics and data. There are no hard statistics on the odds of your small business or home office being “fried”, but the reasonable and unanimous consensus among prediction experts is that the odds dramatically increase. Virtually everyone has experienced power outages in their lives. And statistics point to over a billion dollars in lightning damage alone in 2002.
