Lightning and Outdoor Sports

The latest issue of Outside has an article on Rod Liberal's brush with death via lightning:

Watching an electrical storm from afar is a natural spectacle, but there's good reason to feel fear when it comes closer. If you could stop any one of the 25 million flashes that touch down in the U.S. each year—gargantuan electrical discharges created by the buildup of excess negative charges in clouds—you'd feel heat of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface of the sun. A single flash can carry more than 100 million volts, the equivalent of 833,000 people sticking paper clips into electrical outlets. And lightning has been known to roam as far as 15 miles from the storm that bred it before striking from a clear blue sky. One minute you're the master of a fourteener; the next you're on a gurney with a tube down your throat and a lifetime of recovery ahead of you—if you even survive the current ripping through your nervous system, which can instantly shut down your heart.

Even though I'm pretty good at getting off the field when death from above threatens, I'm probably not good enough. This got me to thinking about the stats, because inevitably somebody wants to keep playing, citing various quoted miniscule odds of being killed in a given year. Conveniently enough, the National Safety Council has an Odds of Dying page (1 in 1, given enough time :-). For lightning, 66 people were killed in 2002, so the NSC rates that as you having a 1 in 4,362,746 chance of dying from lightning in a given year. However, these odds are calculated based on the total US population, which includes the vast majority of people smart enough to stay inside when the thunder booms. What you really need to know, and which is probably unknowable, is how many people in a given year spend time outside during a lightning storm. Divide that number by 66 and then talk to me about odds...