Lightning Fatalities in Bangladesh from 1990 through 2016

While national summaries of lightning fatalities have been published for a number of other countries in recent years, no such summary exists for Bangladesh. Knowledge of the fatality statistics for Bangladesh during a long period will assist in understanding the lightning threat here and in similar nearby regions of the world.

In order to address this lack of data, a summary of lightning-caused fatalities in Bangladesh is presented for the most recent 27-year period. To be explored is whether a large number of fatalities occur in Bangladesh due to its large rate of lightning occurrence and high population density. The location, time of day, week, and month as well as activity, gender, age, and other aspects of the fatalities will be collated by year. It is expected that as some data collection methods improve, there will be a tendency for larger frequencies of fatality reports to be identified in the later years. One of the issues to be considered, if possible, is the availability of a safe location for agricultural workers to reach in case of a thunderstorm. Such safe locations are typically missing in these fields.

The fatality data are combined from a variety of sources during this period on a national basis. The main data sources include local literature, disaster reports by Disaster Forum and NIRAPAD, regional civil surgeon offices, regional dailies, and the next most useful dataset is the national dailies. At least a third of the data was available only in the Bengali language, while the rest was obtained from English-language sources.

A total of 3086 lightning-related fatalities from 1990 to June 2016 and 2382 injuries since 1990 are included. A complementary AMS Annual Meeting paper by Holle and Islam will consider multiple fatalities during a recent event in May 2016 over Bangladesh. Out of 3086 deaths, the overwhelming majority had died (1225 persons) whilst carrying out farming activities followed by deaths within a house (737 persons). Returning home or walking/resting or wandering in the homestead caused 332 deaths whereas fishing, boating and bathing in the waterbody caused a total of 233 deaths. A previous study by Holle has shown a tendency for multiple fatalities to occur in paddy activities in this region and time of year. The location of lightning fatalities, according to district, indicated that all 64 districts had lightning casualties during the study period (1990-2016) however six districts (Sunamganj, Netrokona, Kishoreganj, Brahmanbaria, Cox’s Bazar and Chapai Nawabganj) experienced the highest causalities, ranging from 164 to 258. It is worth noting that five among these six districts had deaths totaling between 91 and 140 from 1990-2016.