Lightning Bolt Kills More Than 300 Reindeer In Norway

It "happened in one moment," a spokesman for the Norwegian Environment Agency said.
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More than 300 reindeer were killed by a lightning strike in Norway on Friday.

The animals were huddled together on the Hardangervidda plateau during a storm. Officials counted 323 reindeer dead in total, including 70 calves, The Norwegian Environment Agency said in a statement.

The eerie scene was discovered during a routine inspection by the Norwegian Nature Inspectorate.

Kjartan Knutsen, a spokesman for the Norwegian Environment Agency, told The Associated Press that reindeer often stick together during poor weather, occasionally leading to group casualties from lightning.

This incident “happened in one moment” and was particularly bad, though.

“We have not heard about such numbers before,” Knutsen said Monday.

Images released by the Norwegian Environment Agency show the hundreds of reindeer carcasses strewn across a grassy stretch of the plateau:

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