SINGAPORE, Oct 26 — A golfer was struck by lightning at the Tanah Merah Country Club yesterday morning, just as he neared the end of an 18-hole game.
The skies had only just turned a little dark and the club had contacted the Meteorological Services to check whether lightning was likely when the 57-year-old was hit.
Soh Lye Huat, a garment company owner, is now in a coma in intensive care at Changi General Hospital.
His son Jeffrey, a 22-year-old national serviceman, said his dad played golf at the Changi Coast Road course once a week with a regular group of three friends and that he was with them yesterday.
Tanah Merah Country Club general manager Roy Higgs said the Met Services usually sends a text message to the on-duty club employee when possible lightning activity is brewing.
The message is usually sent from half an hour to an hour before the club sounds its sirens and makes an announcement over its public address system for all players to clear the greens.
Marshalls also go on patrol to ensure that players leave the course; they generally have to stay off it for 45 minutes.
Higgs said that by the time the Met Services sent the text message at about 10.15am yesterday — after club employees had called it about some dark clouds — the accident had already happened.
The text message instructed the club to clear players off the courses between 10.30am and 11.15am.
When asked, a National Environment Agency spokesman said the Met Services had detected a localised thunderstorm near the Tanah Merah area only at 10.10am and had assessed that lightning would likely hit the area. It sent out a lightning alert five minutes after this.
Data gathered at 9am had indicated that thunderstorms would occur only in western and southern Singapore, not the east, later in the morning and early afternoon.
After Soh was struck, one of his friends, helped by two marshalls, gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before the ambulance came, said Higgs.
A Singapore Civil Defence Force spokesman said that when paramedics arrived, Soh was unconscious.
Higgs explained that country clubs had two ways of getting information on possible lighting activity: They either install their own lightning detection equipment or, like Tanah Merah Country Club, get updates from the Met Services.
Higgs said this was the first time someone had been struck by lightning at its Changi Coast Road course since the club opened in 1982; its other course in Tampines, so far free of lightning mishaps, opened in the mid-1980s.
The younger Soh said: “My dad is stable, but we are still very worried. We are trying to get more information to find out what happened.”
The family, including his mother and 20-year-old undergraduate sister, is keeping vigil. — The Straits Times
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