Featured Image Credit: 9News
Topics: Weather, Australia, World News
Anna Verdon
A man says he is now able to predict when a storm is coming after getting hit by lightning.
Kristoffer Green, 31, was leaving a medical centre in Queensland, Australia, during a storm after taking his daughter in to have a wasp sting looked at.
He was holding an umbrella over his wife as she placed their child in the backseat of the car when a lightning bolt struck the top and travelled down into his body.
“The umbrella has a wooden handle, but the tip of my right index finger was resting on the metal pole in the centre,” he told 9News.
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“It was just like a blinding light and then I blacked out. My wife said I just simply collapsed.”
Luckily, as they were already at the medical centre, Green’s wife raced to get help.
But when Green woke up in his hospital bed he had no idea where he was or what had happened.
He said that his heart was racing ‘a million miles an hour’ and he was transferred to a nearby hospital before going home the following day.
While he was lucky to survive, the effects of the strike, which happened in November 2015, still linger.
For days after, Green said his right arm wouldn’t stop tingling. He’d also become extremely anxious whenever there was a storm.
But more peculiarly, he said he was left being able to predict when a storm was about to hit.
“For a few years after the strike, my right arm – where the lightning went through – would tingle and start to hurt before a storm was overhead,” he said.
“I even sometimes still do it. I’ll say to my wife, ‘There’s a storm coming, hun’ and sure enough, a few hours later, there’s a storm coming in.”
Every year, there are as many as 1,400,000,000 lightning strikes around the world. This equates to 3,000,000 flashes every da or around 44 strikes a second.
This means that every 1 in 12,000 people is likely to get struck by lightning and out of the 500 people who do, 90 percent survive.
The Met Office has highlighted that while the flashes we see as a result of a lightening strike travel at the speed of light (670,000,000mph) an actual lightning strike travels at a comparatively gentle 270,000mph.
It also revealed that Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is the place that receives the most lightning strikes on Earth.
According to the organisation, huge thunderstorms occur on 140-160 nights per year there with an average of 28 lightning strikes per minute, lasting up to 10 hours at a time.
That's as many as 40,000 lightning strikes in one night.