Director's Note 

  This month, Manuela, a young woman who works with an NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), began reporting deaths and injuries from lightning every time she heard of an incident using ACLENet's Incident Reporting Form. In less than two weeks, she had reported incidents (noted below) involving at least 15 deaths and many more injuries! That is only one less than the total US lightning deaths [16] for all of 2017. That is nearly 200 times the lightning death rate in the US!

As we corresponded with her, she told us that 'people in Tshumbe live in fear, especially the children. They don't know what to do during lightning and they have no protection at all from it.'

The DRC has the highest density of lightning in Africa and one of the highest in the world. Yet, because of political instability there, we seldom see newspaper reports of lightning deaths and injuries in the Congo so that reports from concerned citizens are instrumental in collecting data that we can present to governments and other concerned groups to make changes and start saving lives there.  

Not only is Manuela going to continue sending us reports, she has promised to work with her colleagues and friends across the DRC to form a network of citizen reporters. This is ground breaking work that will be used to document the number of people injured by lightning and to bring lightning safety education and protection to this very vulnerable area of the world!

We look forward to working with Manuela and her colleagues to save and improve the lives of the people of the DRC!