For the Boy Scouts this summer, lightning struck twice.

In late July, Scouts from St. Helena , Calif. , were huddled beneath a tarp in Sequoia National Park during a sudden hailstorm when a bolt of lightning hit their hastily strung shelter. A Scout and a leader were killed, and six others were injured.

Five days later, Scouts from Salt Lake City climbed into sleeping bags in a corner of a three-sided log shelter in the midst of a thunderstorm in Utah's Uinta Mountains when lightning struck a nearby tree and then either flashed through the air or streaked through the ground into the structure, killing an Eagle Scout and injuring three others.

While both troops mistakenly followed the understandable tendency to seek shelter from rain and hail - instead of protecting themselves against lightning - lightning-safety experts say the twin tragedies underscore a basic truth: There is no safe place to be outdoors in a lightning storm.

Lightning kills 75 people a year on average in the United States and injures 500 to 700 more, making it more deadly than hurricanes or tornadoes and far more common than people imagine.

"Assume the lightning position when at risk," says the National Outdoor Leadership School 's "Backcountry Lightning Safety Guidelines."

"This position includes squatting and balling up so you are as low as possible without getting prone."

Ron Holle, a government meteorologist for 33 years who now works for Vaisala and is considered a leading expert on lightning safety, calculates the odds for an American being hit by lightning sometime in the course of an 80-year lifetime at about 1 in 3,000, making lightning a far greater threat in the wild than a fatal shark attack, grizzly bear mauling or rattlesnake bite.

Kurt Wedberg, who runs the guide service Sierra Mountaineering International, says the better course of action is "adjusting your itinerary."

"Basically, it comes down to this: 95 percent of the time, we are in running distance to a house or a car," said Michael P. Utley, a survivor of a lightning strike who now runs a nonprofit educational organization called http://www.struckbylightning.org/

Copyright 2005, The Daily Camera. All Rights Reserved. Story by Vernon Loeb, Los Angeles Times August 23, 2005.