Did anyone hear the story on CNN about a lightning bolt hitting the tree at her memorial site? This was the same day the jury found her not guilty. Hmmm...a message?
A message? Doubtful. It was just one of 197 lightning strikes in the Greater Orlando area that day. It's highly unlikely that 196 of them were meaningless and one of them meant something.
It likely wasn't a message any more than lightning striking and destroying Touchdown Jesus while leaving the adult book store next door unscathed was a message. It's likely not any more of a message than the Empire State Building being struck an average of 23 times a year is a message.
Considering the fact that there are an average of 44 lightning flashes per second worldwide, which comes to 44 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 1,387,584,000 per year, and roughly 25% of those flashes are cloud-to-ground strikes, that's 346,896,000 strikes per year worldwide. It seems a little odd that out of the nearly 347 million strikes per year that
one of them would be singled out to be unique enough to be a message.
In the United States alone, more than 22 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes occur annually, with most of those by a wide margin occurring in Florida, and the vast majority of
those occurring in "Lightning Alley", which is the area of central Florida between Tampa and Titusville, which encompasses Orlando. Tampa Bay and the I-4 corridor in Orlando each sees an average of 6,000 lightning strikes in June, and 5,500 strikes in July.
Casey Anthony and Caylee's "memorial" are located in ta-da! Orlando, the middle of
the most lightning active area in the United States, where the tree near the memorial was struck on July 7th, where lightning detectors also recorded 196 other cloud-to-ground strikes on that same day.
After delivering to Palm Beach on July 1, I spent most of July 2 through July 10 in Lightning Alley - Melbourne and Palm Bay, Cocoa, Orlando and Tampa Bay. It was fun.
Did you know that, while death from lightning is rare (average of 55 per year in the US, about the same as tornadoes, half that of flooding, and a third of heat-related deaths) 82% of the deaths from lightning strikes are male? When it comes to lightning, women are cautious, men are reckless.