Assessment of lightning-related damage and disruption in Canada

This article assesses the extent and costs of lightning-related damage and disruption in Canada. Lightning routinely damages property and disrupts economic and social activities. Affected sectors include health; property and casualty insurance; forestry; electricity generation, transmission, and distribution; agriculture; telecommunications; transportation; and tourism and recreation—the first four sectors are the most important in terms of contributing to overall impacts and costs. Secondary data and extrapolations from U.S. studies were used to develop cost estimates for the health, property, forestry, and electricity sectors. Aggregated, annual lightning-related damage and disruption costs in Canada range from CA$600 million to CA$1 billion. Forestry and electricity damages accounted for over 85% of the total. The estimates are both preliminary and conservative. In terms of continued research, additional or more refined studies using Canadian empirical data are warranted for the insurance and electricity sectors. Detailed insurance claim or outage data would permit analysis at the storm level and potentially discern finer-scaled risk patterns. Further effort is also required to evaluate risk or damage prevention measures, particularly those that relate to expanded or enriched use of the Canadian Lightning Detection Network data by both public and private sector clients. Both the degree of adoption and efficacy or cost-effectiveness should be investigated. Copyright Springer 2010