"Lightning never strikes the same place twice" — hearing this, Tanya assumes it is true…

Why

This saying sounds like it should be true, because it is often used to mean 'the same unlucky event will not happen again' — a comforting idea about luck, not actually a rule about how lightning works. Lightning follows the path of least resistance to the ground, and a tall, isolated, conductive structure offers exactly that same easy path every single time a storm passes overhead — nothing about lightning 'remembers' it already struck there once. The Empire State Building is hit by lightning around 25 times a year on average, and has even been struck 8 times in 24 minutes during a single storm; Toronto's CN Tower is hit roughly 75 times a year. Test it: think about why height matters here — a tall building is simply the closest, easiest target for the electrical charge building up in a storm cloud, which is exactly why the SAME tall building keeps getting picked, storm after storm. Her father is right: what determines where lightning strikes is a structure's height, shape, and isolation, not turn-taking — tall buildings get struck again and again.