A 17 -year retrospective review of lightning victims in Austria with focus on lightning effects

Lightning strikes often pose a great risk to humans and their surroundings. Due to the numerous lightning strikes in Styria (province of Austria) individuals are occasionally struck directly or indirectly by lightning. The majority of the victims survived, however carrying away damages to health, varying in their severity. In the period from 2000 to 2017 22 lightning accidents with 55 lightning victims were reported by the local police department, four of the victims not surviving the impact or their consequences. The lightning accidents are analyzed according to several indications, such as daytime of the accident, age and gender of the victims, mechanisms of energy transmission to the human body, visible trails of the current path and amplitudes of the lightning current of the detected strokes, which were compared with data from the literature. The circumstances of the accidents, the effects of the lightning currents on the human body and the medical consequences were very different for all lightning stroke victims in Styria, but all injury patterns described as characteristic in the literature occurred. On average, two people per year were injured by direct or indirect lightning in this area. It could be shown that the amplitude of the lightning stroke is not crucial for the severity of the accidents or the survival of the victims.