The lightning rod on top of the Empire State Building has a routine. A couple of dozen times a year, a channel of superheated air about the width of your thumb links the spire to a cloud, dumps a few hundred million volts down a copper strap, and vanishes into the bedrock under Midtown. Nobody on the observation deck spills their coffee.
Which makes the saying slightly awkward.
What the record actually says
The National Weather Service files “lightning never strikes the same place twice” under myths, sitting next to the belief that crouching in an open field will save you. Its figure for the Empire State Building is an average of 23 strikes a year, and New York City Emergency Management cites the same agency for a rounder 25, adding one detail that settles the argument on its own: in a single storm, the building was hit eight times in 24 minutes.
Eight times. Twenty-four minutes. The phrase does not survive one bad afternoon in Manhattan.
Even that undersells it. What we call a single bolt is usually several discharges running down the same ionised channel a few hundredths of a second apart, which is why lightning flickers instead of just flashing. NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory notes that a negative cloud-to-ground flash can contain as many as 20 return strokes. One strike, by the plain meaning of the word, has already hit the same spot twenty times before the thunder arrives.
Toronto has better instruments
New York gets the poster.
Toronto gets the measurements. The CN Tower is a 450-metre concrete shaft topped by a 100-metre steel antenna mast. Copper strips run its full 553 metres into grounding rods sunk beneath the base, and its operators say the structure takes about 75 strikes a year. Hold that number loosely. When researchers counted flashes optically over many seasons rather than estimating, the long-run average came out closer to 36 a year, a figure cited in a study of the tower’s most intense recorded lightning storm in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. Same tower, half the lightning, depending on who is counting.
That storm is the part I keep going back to. On the night of 24 August 2011, two cameras recorded 52 flashes hitting the tower in a little over 84 minutes, roughly one every 99 seconds. In an hour and a half, the CN Tower absorbed more lightning than it normally sees in a year.
The tower does not wait around
Most of us picture a strike as something aimed downward at a passive object, like a dart at a board. Above about 100 metres, that stops being accurate. Tall structures can launch their own leader upward into the storm, a discharge that begins at ground level and climbs. Tom Warner and colleagues at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology documented 81 upward flashes from ten towers in Rapid City between 2004 and 2010. In 80 of those 81 cases, other lightning had already fired nearby, warping the local electric field enough to tip the tower into going first.
So the spire is less a target than a participant, and quite often the instigator.
People are not towers
Roy Sullivan patrolled Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and between 1942 and 1977 lightning found him seven separate times. Guinness World Records still lists him as the most lightning-struck person on record. His hair caught fire on more than one occasion. He started carrying a container of water in his truck, which is either grim practicality or the darkest joke in the National Park Service.
Sullivan usually gets told as a freak story, and partly he is one. He also spent four decades working outdoors on exposed Blue Ridge terrain during thunderstorms, because that was the job. Seven strikes is astonishing. Forty years of standing in the weather is just employment.
The saying was never a forecast. It is what one person says to another after something terrible, an offer of odds nobody has checked, and it works fine in that role. The copper on the spire operates under different assumptions. It is bolted to the bedrock precisely because whoever installed it understood the sky would be back.
