Some years bring a lot of storms, others don’t. But lightning damage is increasing, even when thunderstorms are not particularly frequent.
Last year, lightning damage to homes and buildings rose to its highest level in two decades. German insurers paid a total of 330 million euros to their customers for 220,000 lightning and surge damage cases, 80 million more than in 2022. This was announced by the General Association of the German Insurance Industry (GDV) in Berlin. However, the reason was not so much an extraordinarily high number of lightning strikes, but rather the increased value of the technology installed in residential buildings.
The average lightning damage was 1,460 euros, the highest it has ever been since GDV statistics began in 1988. “The reason for the high average damage is that buildings and houses are becoming increasingly better equipped technically,” said GDV Deputy General Manager Anja Käfer-Rohrbach.
In total, the lightning measuring devices of VdS Schadenverhütung, a subsidiary of GDV and the Austrian Association for Electrical Engineering (OVE), which also operates in Germany, registered around 195,000 lightning strikes in Germany. There is no comparable figure for the previous year because the service provider has changed.
In the past, Siemens had published a lightning atlas every year, but the Munich-based DAX group has now sold this service to OVE, which has also taken over the 170 measuring stations. According to the latest Siemens figures published in January, lightning struck more frequently in 2023 than in 2022, but not unusually frequently in a long-term comparison. In the turbulent year of 2007, Siemens measuring stations even registered over a million lightning strikes. According to the GDV, the most lightning strikes in Germany occur in August.
Source: Stern
