Colorado man and 34 cows struck and killed by lightning in Jackson County

A 51-year-old man and nearly three dozen cows were struck and killed by lightning in northern Colorado Saturday afternoon, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office said Sunday.

The Jackson County Coroner's Office identified the man as Mike Morgan and said 34 of his cows were also killed in that strike.

A sheriff's office spokeswoman said Morgan was killed while feeding his cattle in the town of Rand, about 120 miles northwest of Denver.

Fatal lightning strikes are extremely rare, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which collects statistics on causes of death.

Between 2006 and 2021, 444 people died from lightning in the United States. Lightning strikes the ground about 40 million times each year, but the chance of being struck in a given year is about one in a million, and about 90 percent of people struck by lightning survive, according to the CDC .

The National Weather Service, however, says that a given person's lifetime risk of being struck is about one in 15,000, based on data collected from 2009 to 2018.

Between 1989 and 2018, the United States averaged 43 lightning deaths per year, but from 2009 to 2018, that average dropped to 27.

Florida, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania lead the nation in lightning injuries, Colorado averaging 16 to 30 per year, according to the CDC. Florida leads the nation with more than 2,000 lightning injuries over the past half-century.