What are the odds of winning the lottery AND getting hit by lightning? One man knows
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The odds are insanely remote... getting struck by lightning and winning a substantial prize in the lottery.
But both of them happened to Canadian Peter McCathie after he won $1 million jackpot in the Atlantic Lottery 649 in 2015.
McCathie survived being hit by lightning when he was a teenager.
The Nova Scotia man survived the lightning strike while wading through the shallow waters of a lake aged 14.
Then a few years later his daughter was also struck by lightning while she was working in Manitoba as a wilderness guide.
So CTV News Canada wanted to know just how unlikely this trio of luck was.
They got in touch with University of Monckton mathematics professor Sophie Leger, who said:
"By assuming that these events happened independently… so probability of lotto… times another probability of lightning – since there are two people that got hit by lightning – we get approximately one in 2.6 trillion," she said.
The odds of being struck by lightning in Canada are less than one in a million.
The odds of winning the Atlantic Lotto 6/49 are even less -- one in 13,983,816.
And Peter McCathie, together with his daughter’s event, has beaten odds of 2.6 trillion to one.
He split the $1 million Lotto 6/49 prize with co-worker Diana Miller. McCathie and Miller have been buying tickets together for about a year, but they never expected to beat the odds.
"I honestly expected to get hit by lightning again first," said McCathie.
He received an additional $10,000 since he owns the Amherst Shore Country Store in Amherst Shore, Nova Scotia, where the duo bought the $3 ticket.
Peter took his wife on a second honeymoon with the money, while his co-winner Diana Miller says she went to Cancun, Mexico.
