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A myth. The Empire State Building gets hit about twenty times a year.
Where it came from
The phrase was a figure of speech about unlikely misfortunes long before anyone treated it as physics.
What’s actually true
Lightning favours tall, pointed, well-grounded objects, and those stay where they are. The Empire State Building is struck around twenty times a year, sometimes several times in one storm.
People can be struck more than once too: the American park ranger Roy Sullivan survived seven strikes between 1942 and 1977.
Further reading
- US National Weather Service, Lightning myths
- Wikipedia: Roy Sullivan