Lightning Fatalities in Bangladesh in May 2016

Primarily on 13 and 14 May 2016, news reports indicated that 64 people were killed by lightning in Bangladesh. This is a very high number for any country in such a short period. The magnitude of such an event was not previously apparent in Bangladesh and resulted in numerous public announcements and widespread concern. Subsequent to this incident, the Government of Bangladesh officially declared lightning as a natural disaster, which was ignored in the past.

The 64 fatalities are examined in this study. The location, time of day and week, activity, gender, age, and other available aspects of the fatalities will be collated. Rice paddy harvesting appears to be a major issue in many of the deaths during this short period. A previous study by Holle showed a tendency for multiple fatalities to occur in paddy activities in this region and time of year. 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. Knowledge of the situation during this intensely-observed period will assist in understanding the lightning threat to agricultural workers here and in similar regions of the world.

It appears that the bundling of reports scattered across the country was made without advance planning by the news media. The fatality data are combined from a variety of sources during this period on a national basis. Those sources include daily newspapers, web reports, and electronic media resources, in the order of those being most complete. At least a third of the data was available only in the Bengali language, while the rest was obtained from English-language sources. Whether such loss of life occurs often but is rarely realized is a separate topic to consider. A complementary 2017 AMS Annual Meeting paper by Dewan et al. will consider all fatalities since 1990 over Bangladesh.

In addition, lightning from the Global Lightning Dataset GLD360 network will be plotted at the times and locations of what are found to be the most concentrated periods and regions where the fatalities occurred. A preliminary map on the 13^th showed good agreement between large amounts of lightning in an east-west swath across the center Bangladesh that appears to be similar to the regions of the fatalities on this date.