A lightning strike injured six people working at a Southwestern Energy natural-gas wellhead in rural Faulkner County during a storm that brought more lightning than usual to Arkansas, authorities said Thursday.
The two most severely injured workers, both men, suffered burns and were listed in fair condition at Conway Regional Medical Center, hospital spokesman Lori Ross said. Two others treated at the hospital were expected to be released.
Another two workers were taken to a Little Rock hospital, Ross said. Southwestern Energy spokesman Christina Fowler said they were taken to Baptist Health Medical Center.
“All I know is they’re nonlife-threatening” injuries, Fowler said.
The injuries occurred at 2:58 p.m. at a well pad at Fairview and Herring roads near the Enders community, which is about 26 miles northeast of Conway and 15 miles northeast of Greenbrier, authorities said.
The injured were among an estimated 10 to 12 workers who had just taken a break as a thunderstorm passed through the area, she said.
“It looked like the storm had passed, and they went back to work, then lightning struck,” Fowler said.
The six - employees of Canary Wellhead and Key Energy Services and doing work for Southwestern Energy - were performing maintenance on a wellhead, she said.
The names of the injured had not been released as of Thursday evening.
At the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock, John Robinson said there was some cloud to-ground lightning in the area where the workers were injured, “but not a whole lot.”
But there had been an unusually large amount of lightning throughout Arkansas on Thursday afternoon, said Robinson, a warning-coordination meteorologist.
“Between 4 and 5 p.m., there were about 3,500 lightning strikes in Arkansas,” Robinson said. “Between noon and 5 p.m., there would have been about 7,800 lightning strikes” in the state.
In an average year, he said, lightning strikes the ground in Arkansas about 750,000 times.
“It’s not that unusual if people are close together for lightning to hit the ground and then spread” among them, Robinson said. The most he had heard of was “in the dozens” at a sporting event.
The lightning struck the workers as one thunderstorm left the area and another was moving in, he said.
“The times that people are most likely to get hit by lightning are just as a storm is moving away or moving in,” Robinson said. People are more likely to be inside during “the middle of a storm” or when rain is heavy.
One wave of storms entered western Arkansas early Thursday and weakened before strengthening again and moving through central and eastern Arkansas, he said. A second round of storms had moved into the state by afternoon.
Nathan James, chief of Centerville’s Volunteer Fire Department, which responded to the injuries, declined comment, saying Southwestern Energy had told the department not to do so.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/25/2014