Lightning killed a 35-year-old woman in Chatra on Sunday, taking the count of deaths caused by lightning strikes to 15 in Jharkhand in less than a week. Around 14 others died in lightning strikes in different parts of the State on Thursday.
On Thursday, four people died in Latehar while two died in Lohardaga and Gumla each. Lightning also claimed three lives in Bokaro and one each in Jamshedpur, Palamu, Muri and Piparwar.
Thirty-five-year-old Rita Devi was struck by lightning on Sunday morning while she was cleaning the backyard of her house in Silaiya village of Chatra district. She died on the spot. A few hours later, the local police reached the spot and sent her body for postmortem.
“We saw a flash of light and a deafening sound. A few minutes later, we found her (Devi’s) body in our backyard,” the deceased’s widower Krishna Yadav told the police.
According to SDMA, around 1,800 people have been killed by lightning in the last 12 years in Jharkhand. The SDMA data says that lightning kills a person every second day on an average in a year. Experts, however, say the numbers are much higher as several deaths in state’s remote areas go unreported.
“Lightning claimed around 228 lives in Jharkhand in 2016 and 240 in 2017. We can say that lightning kills around 250-300 people in Jharkhand every year,” said Colonel Sanjay Srivastava, former project officer of SDMA.
Lightning has been declared a natural disaster in Jharkhand. The Government pays a compensation of Rs.4 lakh to the family of people who die in lightning strikes here.