UF Study: Florida Parks Need Emergency Plan For Lightning Strikes

August 22, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s notorious lightning season conflicts with playtime as most of the municipal park and recreation departments in the state lack written emergency plans to deal with these sudden flashes of electricity, a new University of Florida study finds.

The majority of 125 park and recreation directors responding to a survey last year said they perceived a high or very high probability of lightning striking their outdoor facilities, yet fewer than half the agencies had written lightning-safety policies or plans to protect visitors, said J.O. Spengler, a UF professor in the department of recreation, parks and tourism who led the study. The results appear in the current issue of the Journal of Park and Recreation Administration.

The National Athletic Trainer’s Association recommends such plans for athletics and recreation because the potential risk of lightning-related injuries is greatest during the most active time periods for outdoor sports. An estimated 100 people are killed and 1,000 more are injured by lightning each year.

Most lightning-related injuries occur between the hours of 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., the most active time for recreational sports, such as youth soccer and adult softball leagues, said Dan Connaughton, a UF professor of exercise and sport sciences involved in the study

“Since recreational sport activities often involve large groups of participants and spectators, there is the potential for mass injuries, especially if lightning were to strike a soccer field with children playing or metal bleachers filled with family members,” he said.

An additional problem is that children and young adults may not fully understand or appreciate the risks of lightning, he said.

“Because these recommendations are so new, we don’t see Florida’s city park and recreation departments as being unsafe or dangerous, but merely in a position to increase their understanding of lightning and hopefully improve their lightning-safety practices,” Spengler said.

In 2000, the trainers’ association put forth a position statement identifying six recommended components that should be included in lightning-safety policies or plans for athletics and recreation. “The NATA recommendations are significant because they are, to our knowledge, the only recommendations that are specific to sport and recreational activities,” Spengler said.

Slightly more than a third of park and recreation agencies in the survey – 36 percent – had written lightning-safety policies and less than half – 41 percent – had written action plans to follow in the event of lightning, he said.

As part of such a plan, the association recommends selecting a weather watcher who looks for signs of threatening weather and notifies a person with authority to cancel or suspend play if weather becomes dangerous, Spengler said. Park and recreation departments also should have specific criteria for suspending and resuming recreational activities, he said.

Nearly all the departments in the study – 94 percent – were located in rural communities or small towns. They typically offered a combination of field and court sport activities.

Florida was chosen for the study because of its high incidence of lightning and lightning-related injuries and deaths, Connaughton said. A path that runs through the central portion of Florida known as “Lightning Alley” records more than 100 days of thunderstorms annually, the most in the United States, he said.

While the researchers are not prepared to generalize about the parks and recreational facilities in the rest of the nation, Spengler said he suspects the findings would be similar.

In all, 46 percent of park and recreation directors in the survey provided formal training in lightning safety to their staff members and 31 percent provided lightning-safety information to program participants, Spengler said.

A larger share – 75 percent – said they monitored for lightning. Experts recommend using a combination of monitoring methods. For example, listening to the radio or watching a television weather report in addition to watching the sky, Connaughton said.

About 42 percent of the park and recreation directors surveyed reported they had designated lightning shelters. It was unclear how close these shelters were to outdoor courts or ball fields, or whether they offered adequate protection from lightning, Connaughton said.

“The safest shelters are grounded structures, not dugouts or ungrounded buildings,” he said.

Because lightning-strike victims often suffer cardiac arrest, knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, is important, Connaughton said. “There have been cases of people who have suffered cardiac arrest being revived with CPR after a lightning strike,” he said.

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents -74 percent – required CPR certification of their full-time staff, the study found.

No single recommendation is more important than another because they all tie together, Spengler said. “It doesn’t do any good to clear the field but run to an unsafe shelter, or to have a shelter but not be able to reach it in time,” he said.