Faizuddin is still traumatized from the lightning strike that killed his three friends as they took selfies atop a 400-year-old fort in India, where climate change is making lethal strikes more common.
Scores of people this year met similarly gruesome ends in the western desert state of Rajasthan, where deaths caused by thunderstorms used to be uncommon.
“I was hit by three thunderbolts, one after the other,” Faizuddin said, his voice quivering as he lay wrapped in a blanket at his modest home in Jaipur.
Photo: AFP
He and his trio of childhood friends had climbed hundreds of steps to a watchtower on top of Amer Fort during a July storm that also claimed eight other lives.
“The sound was deafening, it felt like a huge bomb blast. My trousers and shoes caught fire, my limbs became stiff and I couldn’t move,” the 21-year-old said, a deep gash still on his head.
Official figures showed that about 2,500 people die in lightning strikes in India each year, compared with just 45 in the US.
Cattle and other animals are often killed or maimed during severe thunderstorms, with one burst of lightning in northeastern Assam state wiping out a herd of 18 elephants in May. Thunderbolts contain as much as 1 billion volts and can cause immense damage to buildings when they hit.
Earlier this year at a fort in Chittorgarh, a few hours south of where Faizuddin’s friends died, a bolt struck a tower and sent a huge chunk of stone plummeting to the ground.
The site was fitted with a rod to draw lightning away from the centuries-old structure, “but it proved to be ineffective,” said Ratan Jitarwal, a conservator supervising the fort’s painstaking repair work.
Lightning is also becoming more frequent, with nearly 19 million recorded strikes in the 12 months to March — up by one-third from the previous 12-month period.
Global warming is driving the increase, said Sanjay Srivastava, a representative of the Lightning Resilient India Campaign, one of the few organizations collecting data on thunderstorms.
“Because of climate change and localized heating of the Earth’s surface and more moisture, there is a sudden surge of huge lightning,” he said.
The problem is worldwide, with research this year forecasting a possible doubling of the average number of lightning strikes inside the Arctic Circle over this century.
This could spark widespread tundra fires and trigger massive amounts of carbon stored in the permafrost escaping into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming.
Evidence suggests that lightning strikes are also becoming more common in urban areas — a particular concern in India, where the urban population is forecast to rise dramatically in the coming years.
Srivastava said that the results could be catastrophic if, for example, a strike hit a hospital and shorted out equipment used to keep patients on life support in intensive care.
Many people are also unaware of the dangers and what to do — like not to shelter under a tree and avoiding open areas — in a thunderstorm.
“Had we known that lightning strikes ... can kill and maim, we would have never allowed our son to step out of the house,” said Mohammed Shamim, whose 20-year-old son died in the Amer Fort incident. “He had worn a new shirt that day and all he wanted was to take some nice shots on his phone. But it feels as if some devil came from the sky and took our son away.”
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