Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Incidents caused by lightning attended by the Fire Brigades in the United Kingdom, have been analysed for the five years 1948 to 1952. The estimated number of incidents per year varied between 94 and 176, except in 1952, when there was a total, estimated from a 1 in 4 random sample, of 296. The occupancies most frequently involved were houses and flats (68 per cent of the incidents in buildings) and agriculture and forestry (73 per cent of the incidents not in buildings). The materials most commonly first ignited, were electrical insulation, (26 per cent of all incidents), structural woodwork (17 per cent) and hay (12 per cent). There were, in 1948, 1950 and 1952, a total of 36 casualties reported. Some of these were caused by fire and not directly by lightning. There were no fatal casualties in the reports examined, but the Registrar General's statistics for the same three years show that there were 35 fatalities resulting directly from lightning. Twentyfive of the fires in these three years were serious, but they were mainly in occupancies where there was a considerable quantity of flammable rnaterial and in which any fire once started was likely to become serious whatever the original source of ignition. There was no particularly outstanding hazard, and no particular point in buildings (such as wireless or television aerials) at which lightning strikes were especially frequent.