Why Do So Many People Die From Lightning Strikes In Indonesia?

Fatahillah was washing a spoon in the sink when the sky suddenly opened up.

"I heard thunder followed by a loud crack," he told me. "The next thing I remember is regaining consciousness and opening my eyes. That's when I realized I was blind."

Fatahillah, 14, was one of the eleven students and two faculty members eating a snack at an open tin-roofed canteen near their school, SMP Al-Alaq, in Lhokseumawe, a coastal city in Indonesia's far north Aceh province. The canteen, which was really little more than a shack, was the second-tallest thing in the area and it sat next to the tallest—a large tree that towered over the modest building.

Lightning had struck the nearby tree moments after a storm rolled in and then hopped sideways to hit Fatahillah and twelve others in what scientists call a "side flash." All of them, including Fatahillah and his friend Suhail Mubarak, collapsed immediately. Another student, 13-year-old Mohammad Zaki, and a driver who worked at the school died from the shock. Witnesses say Zaki was eating nasi goreng on a bench, with his feet swinging above the ground, instead of standing like the other boys, in the moments before the strike. When the lightning hit, he wasn't grounded and the electricity had nowhere else to go.

“When I approached Zaki his body was slumped against the canteen's table and there was a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth," said Sumardi, a school administrator. "I still hoped he could be saved but he was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital.”

Sumardi quickly surveyed the scene. The boys were all unconscious. The tree was split in half, it's trunk scorched after briefly catching fire. Sumardi told me that he was sure the children were dead. Then he saw Suhail raise his hand slightly. The boy later told me it took all his strength to raise his hand for help. When he came-to, he was blind and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.

Sumardi recalled leaning over Suhail's body and, fearful for his own safety, uttering a short prayer before reaching his hand out to help the young boy.

"For a second I was worried about touching him in case the lightning could pass into my body," Sumardi told me. "But I knew I had to help so I just prayed and grabbed hold of him."

The tragedy, which occurred in late October, was the latest in a shockingly common trend in developing countries like Indonesia. Take a moment to chart some of the estimated 24,000 lightning deaths that occur globally in any given year and you'll start to notice a strange story in the statistics—death rates hew closely to economic divisions. In the poorer countries of Asia, ones with inadequate infrastructure and lower education rates, death by lightning strikes arefar more common than elsewhere in the world.

The situation is especially bad in Sumatra and Java—the location of some of the most-intense lightning storms in the world. This is because of the islands' geography. Warm, humid air blows in from the Indian Ocean where it hits the volcanic mountains of Sumatra and Java—producing some tremendous storms. Bogor, West Java, a satellite city in the suburbs of Jakarta, carries the distinction as one of the most lightning-prone places out there, with hundreds of reported strikes a year. And on some islands, thunder and lightning storms occur as often as 218 days out of the year, according to data compiled by the World Survey of Climatology.

OK, so there are a lot of lightning storms in Indonesia, but that doesn't explain why they are so deadly. One reason, according to experts, is inadequate infrastructure. The number of lighting deaths in the United States dropped dramatically as better home construction, a shift in labor practices, and the spread of lightning rods took hold.

Locally, an increase in illegal—and legal—logging, as well as the effects of climate change have also been blamed. But take a moment and look up at the previous paragraph. See the line about labor practices? That, more than anything else, might be the reason why countries like Indonesia and India report far more deadly lightning strikes than South Korea and Japan.

What do I mean by labor practices? I'm talking about agricultural work. The agricultural sector accounts for a whopping 41 percent of the Indonesian workforce. Most of the work involves backbreaking manual labor alone in a field. The country simply doesn't have the kind of large-scale industrial farms now common in the US. That industrialization brings with it heavy machines to replace physical labor—things like fully enclosed tractors, which are far better at protecting farmers from lightning strikes than a water buffalo and a plow.

So more people die from lightning strikes in developing Asia because more people work in the agricultural sector, where they farm using some pretty old-school, low-tech methods. But there's more to the story than just farming. A lot of people also aren't all that aware of the dangers of lightning storms, explained Hartono Zainal Abidin, an expert from neighboring Malaysia.

"It is a growing problem in the region," he told the BBC. "Lightning incidents are indeed going up and so are the deaths and injuries but the problem is many countries in the region including Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand don't even have proper experts and so the issue is left unaddressed."

In Indonesia, superstitions play a far larger role in shaping local beliefs about lightning than science. Fatahillah told me that the woman who sold them snacks actually warned them of the storm before the strike happened, but for a totally different reason.

“She told us to be quiet and stop being so rowdy," he told me. "She said if we carried on making so much noise we would be hit by a lightning bolt as punishment."

EMTs were able to save Fatahillah and Suhail, but only after a long wait. The storm turned the roads leading to the canteen to mud and the ambulance couldn't get close enough to transport the children to the closest medical center. When Suhail was finally loaded into the back of an ambulance, he started to convulse in pain, he told me.

"It felt like my whole body was on fire," he said. "I was told later that I was trying to rip my own hair out because of the pain. My skin was burning, it was like being in hell."

Fatahillah recalled being in an intense amount of pain. Even the weight of his sheets on his skin sent him into screaming fits.

“My skin was so sensitive that I couldn’t bear it when anything touched me," he told me. "But I couldn’t swallow or talk properly so it was hard to make people understand what I wanted."

By the time I met the boys, both of them were back on their feet. The lightning strike messed with their concentration for a few weeks, they said, and they still had coin-sized holes on the soles of their feet from where the lightning exited their bodies. Statistically, nine out of every ten people struck by lightning survive, but there are still lasting effects that could forever change one's life.

“I never go out now if there is a storm” Suhail told me. “I used to love playing football in the rain with my friends, but now I’m too traumatized.”