ST. LOUIS, Mo. – You may have heard lightning will never strike the same place twice but that may not be the case especially for the Gateway Arch.
The Arch is 630 feet high and made of 43,000 tons of steel and concrete. In other words: it’s the perfect target for lightning strikes. During Sunday night’s storm, the Arch was on the receiving end of multiple lightning strikes.
But as the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, Mother Nature is known for making at her mark.
A YouTube channel by Dan Robinson shared a slow-motion video of the strikes.
The same storm produced lightning that injured four men in a south St. Louis park and started fires at a Metro-East farm and a Jefferson County home.
Pam Sanfilippo, Chief of Museum Services and Interpretation at Gateway Arch National Park, said there are built-in lightning rods atop the Arch and the structure itself is anchored in bedrock.
“So people inside typically would not even feel it if lightning struck while either in the tram or going up to the top,” she said.
Sanfilippo said lightning may strike the Arch even more than once during the same storm. If you’d like to see for yourself, there’s a livestream at ArchPark.org.
