When Lightning Strikes Twice

On October 15, baseball fan Keith Hupp caught the winning home run at a playoff game in Los Angeles. A few days later, he was in Chicago for another playoff game where he caught a second home run ball. Dodger Stadium sits 56,000 fans, while Wrigley Field has a capacity of over 41,000. How was one person lucky enough to get two ‘once in a lifetime’ souvenirs in the same week?

In 2005, another fan caught two home run balls during the same playoff game (though it was a long 18-inning affair). At the time, ESPN asked Stanford University statistics professor Brad Efron about the odds of catching a home run ball at a baseball game. Given that a few thousand people are sitting in the sections of the stadium where home run balls are hit, Professor Efron pegged the odds of catching one at somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 5,000.

ESPN also counted the seats in both left and right field, determining that about 10% of the fans at the stadium were sitting in those sections.

Wrigley Field, showing the outfield seats in the background. Creative Commons via Wikipedia by Jason Hernandez.

Of course, it’s much more improbable for the same person to catch two home runs.

Struck by Lightning

Your chances of being struck by lightning in any given year are 1 in 960,000. (Those odds might improve if you spent some time around the mouth of the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, where there is lightning about 300 days per year.) Your odds of being struck twice in your lifetime are 1 in 9 million. Sources disagree on these kinds of odds, but they are approximately in the correct ballpark.

That’s still better than your chances of winning a jackpot in the Powerball lottery, which are 1 in 292 million. Wait, did I say being struck TWICE by lightning? But lightning doesn’t strike twice, does it?

He never said never.

Just ask the poor people in these videos if lightning can strike twice in the same place (and judge for yourself if the videos are real or fake!).

In 2003, NASA-funded scientists studied lightning strikes across the United States and concluded that 35 percent of lightning strikes actually hit the ground in more than one place. On average, a lightning strike hits the ground in 1.45 places, which means that the chances of being hit are greater than if they are calculated from the number of flashes.

There are numerous news reports of repeated lightning strikes also. In 2013, a few hours after Pope Benedict XVI resigned, an AFP photographer and several others witnessed two separate lightning strikes to the top of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Here is a picture of one:

In 2013, ABC News reported that a Texas man was struck twice in quick succession by lightning. In May 2017, the BBC reported that lightning had struck a Stratford tower block twice. These strikes were caught on video and you can see them here: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-40083120/lightning-strikes-stratford-tower-block-twice

In 2014, a visitor to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado was struck and killed by lightning. A day later in the same area of the park, four others were injured by another lightning strike.

In 2015, according to TIME Magazine, an Illinois man was struck by lightning outside his home; he also had been hit almost two decades earlier while working at a cemetery. Fortunately, he didn’t end up in a grave. Also, his name was Rod (and I’m not making that up). For getting hit twice, hopefully he earned the name “Lightning Rod”.

Start the ‘Jaws’ Music

In 2013, Greg Pickering was attacked by a shark in Australia. That came nine years after his first shark attack, making him one of the only people in the world to have suffered two shark attacks.

Jaws. Universal Pictures.

Pickering also was sailing on a boat that capsized in 2009 and spent three hours in the water before help arrived. Perhaps the fact that he has been diving for abalone for 40 years increased his chances of maritime mishaps, but that’s still a lot of trouble for one person to encounter.

And let’s not forget Erik Norrie. In 2013, the Guardian suggested he may be the world’s “unluckiest man”. Norrie lost a chunk of his leg to a shark while vacationing in the Bahamas, but that’s only part of his story. He also survived a lightning strike. And was bitten once by a rattlesnake. When asked if there were any other events, he mentioned that he had been attacked twice and punched by monkeys as well.

Climbing through piles of rocks in the desert or walking through the jungle with an armload of bananas might increase the odds of those last two, but if this guy really was struck by lightning and attacked by a shark, then it’s true that life can be larger than tall tales. Suffering these events may make him unlucky, but surviving them all makes him a lucky person.

Perhaps maybe his luck ran out in 2014 when he was indicted on federal charges for selling an unlicensed pesticide and obstructing justice.

Big Numbers

Winning the lottery can be more difficult to achieve than getting struck by lightning. The chances of winning the EuroMillions lottery jackpot, for example, are 1 in 139,838,160. It’s 1 in 258 million odds for the MegaMillions. The odds of winning any lottery’s jackpot are 1 in a lot.

And yet multiple people have won lottery jackpots more than once. Some have won jackpots two, three, and even four times. Mathematics professor Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery jackpot four times for a total of almost $21 million. If you take every grain of sand in the entire world and multiply that number by 18, then one in that number would be the odds of Ginther having done what she did.

Of course, she also has a PhD in Math from an elite university and she has spent tens of thousands of dollars buying scratch-offs for each game, which she hauled back to a hotel room in bags. By some accounts, Ginther may have even spent millions of dollars on tickets over the years. Her chances of winning were probably higher than the published odds because she waited to buy until late in the games, after the lottery operator announced that the winning tickets had not been sold yet, thus greatly increasing the possibility of buying a winner.

Four-time Lottery Jackpot Winner Joan Ginther. Source: Philly.com.

If you ever see a job opening for a “Ticket Scratcher” in a Texas border town, let me know.

Until then, I will leave you with a table of approximate odds for some unlikely events. There is also a long source list below, including sources I did not use for double tornado strikes and houses that get crashed into by cars multiple times (this post is long enough already).

Remember, even with long odds, lightning can strike twice.

Approximate odds for a series of unlikely events. MacLeans.ca

Sources (lots of them):

Fan Catches Dodgers Home Run: https://sports.yahoo.com/dodgers-fan-wearing-chase-utley-220629338.html
Fan Catches 2nd Home Run Ball: http://kwese.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/21076357/fan-snares-playoff-home-runs-dodger-stadium-wrigley-field
Likelihood of Catching Home Run Ball: http://www.espn.com/mlb/playoffs2005/news/story?id=2186452
Odds of Winning Powerball and Being Struck By Lightning: http://wncn.com/2016/01/12/odds-of-winning-powerball-jackpot-less-than-being-hit-by-lightning-twice/
Venezuela Spot Has Most Lightning Strikes: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/guinness-record-most-lightning-venezuela_n_4690219.html
NASA-funded strikes research: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/0107lightning.html
Vatican Struck Twice by Lightning: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/lightning-bolt-hit-vatican-not-1705156
Struck Twice: http://abcnews.go.com/US/texan-man-struck-lightning-day/story?id=20707448
Two Strikes for Rod, Two Decades Apart: http://time.com/3937179/lightning-strikes-man-twice-rod-wolfe-survivor/
Two Shark Attacks: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/west-australian-man-stable-after-second-shark-attack-in-10-years
World’s Unluckiest Man? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2385291/Worlds-unluckiest-man-Erik-Norrie-attacked-shark-survived-lightning-strike-rattlesnake-bite.html
Odds of Winning EuroMillions: https://www.euro-millions.com/odds-of-winning
Odds of Winning MegaMillions: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/powerball-mega-millions-lottery-odds-us/
Ginther, Four Time Lottery Jackpot Winner: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/lottery/Joan_Ginther_tops_other_multiple_winners_in_lottery_history.html
Cars Crash Into House Twice in One Week: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Car-Crashes-Into-Emerald-Hills-Home-Twice-In-Three-Days-439355313.html
Can Tornadoes Hit the Same Place Twice? http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46631270/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/can-tornadoes-hit-same-place-twice/#.WelzQjCX2Uk

Here are images from a June 2014 storm in which downtown Chicago’s skyscrapers were struck 17 times in the same evening.