Driving home from the Las Vegas Aces game tonight in yet another desert monsoon – pouring rain, lightning flashing overhead every few seconds – got me wondering: How often is the Stratosphere Tower struck by lightning? As the tallest object in these parts, and with a huge metal spike on top, I imagine it must happen relatively frequently.
We couldn’t find any statistics for lightning striking the Strat tower; we couldn’t even find any for average number in Las Vegas per year. But we did find that Nevada ranks at 42 for the average number of lightning strikes per year out of the 50 states; our 2.55 strikes per square kilometer compare to Florida, at number one, with 86 strikes per square kilometer.
We also came up with the skyscrapers that endure repeated lightning strikes every year. The Willis Tower in Chicago, third highest in the U.S. at 1,451 feet, gets the most: 250 strikes between 2015 and 2020. One World Trade Center in New York City, at 1,776 feet the tallest building in the U.S., was struck 189 times over that same period, while the 1,023-foot-tall Bank of America Plaza in Atlanta weathered received 173 strikes. The JP Morgan Chase Tower in Houston was recorded 75 strikes during the period; the CN Tower in Toronto averages 75 per year. The Empire State Building was struck 50 times and the Key Tower in Cleveland 39 times.
All the buildings are protected by lightning rods that isolate and ground the strikes, so there’s no damage and no one, in general, is injured. The Strat tower is no exception. But we suspect that it’s not hit as often as you might think, since lightning here is pretty much limited to monsoon season, which starts at the earliest in mid-June and ends at the latest in mid-September; mostly, it’s limited to July and August.
When lightning comes near the Strat, photographs tend to try to capture hits and over the past nine years of so, we’ve seen only three snaps of lightning striking the top of the tower. Here are the links:
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AL
Sep-01-2022
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