100 times a second, a bolt of lightning super heats the surrounding air, causing it to rapidly expand and explode.

Shockwave creates a clap of thunder.

Most lightning never touches the ground.

It discharges inside thunderclouds.

But when it does strike, it could do so anywhere on earth, delivering a trillion watts of electricity, enough energy to power an entire city.

Running across the centre of Florida is America's lightning hot spot, known as Lightning Alley.

Every year there are over 50 strikes per square mile, and every year people get hit.

On a September evening in 1999 fisherman Dave Grill Meyer had just cast his line into the lake without warning.

A bolt of lightning streak down from the cloud above him, with shocking consequences.

The rod, as you see here, what's left of it was about a seven foot rod.

It was obviously so hot.

It burns a boxy away, evaporated and left nothing but the carbon fibers at the end of the rod.

It wasn't just the road that was damaged.

Dave suffered multiple burns, but it was the condition of his clothes that revealed the true power of the strike with Zipper was all gone and I Several months later, I asked paramedical, Was there anything stuck in me because your zipper was almost burned on years?

Dear Adam, that's how hot it got.

This is what's left.

This is where my beeper was at on my side.

It doesn't look too bad there compared to what the paper looked like when I got it back.

Dave thought his boots were untouched until he saw strange pinholes where the lightning had finally left his body.

I guess the electricity passed through my body to the bottom of the chute and jumped over the hell and back to the ground.

The ground itself.

Dave was one of the lucky ones.

One in every 10 lightning strike victims dies instantly across North America.

More people are killed by lightning than by tornadoes or hurricanes.

But there is a place on earth that's even more dangerous Heart of Equatorial Africa.

Here there are more lightning strikes than anywhere else on Earth.

Dr.

Earl Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a world authority on lightning.

Using data from NASA satellites, he calculates that lightning strikes the Congo basin more than twice as many times as Florida.

In some places, there are over 300 strikes per square mile every year.

But lightning in this part of the world has rarely been studying.

So today Earl is at the border between Zambia on the Democratic Republic of Congo to witness the lightning for himself.

As darkness falls, the thunderstorms begin.

There's been much evidence that this is the most electrically active place on the planet, and now to finally be here and see it from the ground and witness the high rates of lightning is very exciting.

Some strikes can't be seen with the naked eye, so one way to count them is by using an optical sensor that beeps every time there's a flash.

On average, storm produces around two strikes a minute.

Here, Earl measures more than 60 a minute.

Storms here are definitely living up to expectations.

They're producing lightning at Reed's, which are extraordinarily high.

This is really the best place to study lightning on earth.