CLIFTON , N.J. – The forecast was ugly the day Matthew Tresca died.

The National Weather Service warned throughout the afternoon of severe weather in the Pocono Mountains where the teenager and more than 300 other Boy Scouts were at a one-week camp.

At the end of supper, as lightning flashed in the distance, scout leaders dismissed the boys from the dining hall and sent them to their tented campsites in the woods. Around 7 p.m., lightning struck a tent pole near the picnic table where 16-year-old Matthew sat under a tarp. He suffered cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead within 90 minutes.

That was Aug. 2, 2002. Since then, his parents have pursued a slow-moving lawsuit against the Boy Scouts’ national leadership and the scout council that ran the camp, alleging that proper training and planning would have kept the boys longer in the shelter of the dining hall, preventing Matthew’s death. They’re not the only ones criticizing the scouts when it comes to lightning safety – several prominent experts share such concerns.

“If it’s going to take the Boy Scouts getting hit in the pocket to protect anyone else’s family, then that’s what I guess it takes,” said Mary Tresca, sitting with her husband in their suburban New Jersey home as they spoke of Matthew’s case.

The Boy Scouts deny any negligence; scout officials have described Matthew’s death as “an act of God” and blamed a “rogue lightning bolt” from skies that appeared to be clearing. More generally, national Scout officials say they do their best to provide sound safety recommendations to local Scout councils and then trust council personnel to make good use of that information.

Since 1995, however, Associated Press and newspaper archives show that seven scouts and Scout leaders have been killed and about 50 injured in 15 lightning incidents at scout camps or on expeditions. National Boy Scout officials testifying in the Tresca case said they were unaware of several of those incidents, including the death of a Scout leader at a camp near Pittsburgh in 2001.

A half-dozen of the country’s foremost lightning-safety experts and advocates said in interviews that the organization – which sends roughly 1 million boys into the outdoors each summer – has an out-of-date approach and should be doing more in terms of training and vigilance.

“I was an Eagle Scout – I love the Boy Scouts,” Air Force meteorologist William Roeder said. “But on this one they’re wrong. I do believe the Boy Scouts of America need to improve their lightning safety.”

Roeder has provided weather advice to the space program at Cape Canaveral, and said he offered to help the Scouts update their policies but was rebuffed.

“They have their heads in the sand,” said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the University of Illinois-Chicago, a leading expert on lightning injuries. “Just about everybody else has come around on lightning safety – golfers, boaters, park managers. The Boy Scouts are the one holdout.”

Experts say some lightning casualties are inevitable when an organization sends so many young people into the wilderness, sometimes on multi-day hiking trips with limited shelter options. But Ronald Holle, an Arizona-based meteorologist and lightning-detection expert, believes some of the deaths – including Matthew Tresca’s – were preventable.

“This was not a ‘rogue bolt of lightning,’” Holle wrote in a court brief submitted on behalf of the Trescas. “If only on the basis of hearing thunder and seeing the flashes during the day, trained people should have kept everyone in the dining hall.”

The criticism of the Boy Scouts falls into two main categories.

Holle and other experts say local scout councils should be required to adopt detailed lightning-safety plans for their camps, encompassing such matters as monitoring severe weather and planning in advance where Scouts should seek shelter. They say national Scout officials should ensure such plans are followed diligently.

Experts also say lightning safety should be a mandatory and detailed component of Scout leaders’ training. For example, they want leaders to be uniformly taught the rule of waiting 30 minutes after a storm’s last visible bolt before resuming outdoor activities.

They also want to spread the word that only substantial buildings and metal-enclosed motor vehicles – not tents – provide safe shelter from lightning. Some experts suggested the Boy Scouts could offer a merit badge in lightning safety, thus creating a larger corps of adult leaders versed in the topic.

John Jensenius, a National Weather Service lightning expert based in Gray, Maine, said every major outdoor recreation group should require lightning-safety training for leaders.

“With lightning safety, you’re balancing inconvenience and risk,” he said. “If you’re with a group, you should be willing to be more inconvenienced than if you’re on your own.”

The Boy Scouts, offered an opportunity to respond in detail to the criticisms and suggestions, issued a statement.

“Lightning safety education is an important part of our comprehensive safety program. It is taught to Scouts and Scout leaders at every level, at our schools and in the field,” the association said. “Of course, Scouting is always alert to ways to improve its safety regime. However, no other youth organization spends as much effort on lightning safety and education as the Boy Scouts of America.”

More on the Scouts’ thinking about lightning safety is laid out in sworn depositions obtained over the past two years by the Trescas’ lawyer, Peter Korn. Senior Scout officials said they expect local councils to draw up emergency response plans, but leave the details – including any lightning-safety plans – up to the councils. The premise is that they know best about local weather and geography.

“Our standard of care is to provide good information to the local councils and the local volunteers to make decisions,” association director of camping David Bates said in his testimony. “We haven’t told anybody that it was their responsibility to develop a lightning-safety plan.”

Bates said his office would have no way of knowing if councils were negligent in addressing the matter.

Debra Griffith, who oversees handling of insurance claims against the Boy Scouts, said lightning safety had not risen high on her office’s priority list because other problems – including falls and motor-vehicle accidents – trigger far more claims.

“Lightning’s not even in the top 10,” she said in her testimony, although she said she was unsure how many lightning injuries had occurred recently.

Edward Woodlock, the association’s director of health and safety services, testified that the national office had no staff member whom he considered a lightning-safety expert; he knew of no effort to consult outside experts.

Woodlock also said he was unaware of several recent lightning incidents injuring Scout personnel. He said his office relied on local councils to report such incidents and conduct any reviews as to whether safety procedures need improvements.

“Each of these is different,” Woodlock said of lightning threats. “Each of our properties, each storm, each facility. You can’t come up with a magic answer for every situation.”

The association’s top official, Chief Scout Executive Roy Lee Williams, also gave a deposition after his lawyers failed to quash the request. Asked how many Boy Scouts and leaders had been killed and injured by lightning during his leadership, Williams replied, “I couldn’t say if it was one or a hundred.”

Michael and Mary Tresca, both 47, say they never heard from the national Scout office since their son’s death, and are disillusioned with an organization they once admired.

“In any organization, there needs to be accountability,” said Michael Tresca, a buyer for a telecommunications company.

Although his two younger brothers became Scouts as adolescents and were at the Poconos camp with him, Matthew was the most enthusiastic about scouting – joining the Cub Scouts in kindergarten.

“He absolutely loved it,” said his mother, an executive waitress at a pharmaceutical company.

Matthew checked into the Resica Falls Scout reservation in Monroe County, Pa., in late July of 2002, along with other Scouts from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia-based Cradle of Liberty Council ran the camp.

On the evening of Aug. 2, some 350 campers and leaders were in the dining hall as rain began to fall, and lightning flashed in the distance.

The camp’s aquatics director, Marc Spera, testified that he heard reports of an approaching storm on his ham radio and suggested to leaders at the head table that the Scouts be kept longer in the dining hall.

Spera quoted the camp’s program director, John Oros, as replying, “No, let it go. I don’t want to cause panic.”

Oros, in a deposition, denied having any such conversation with Spera. He said leaders at the head table felt the storm had passed and it was safe to dismiss the scouts.

Had he known of the weather service storm warning, “it would not have changed things,” Oros testified. “The campers were in their campsites, a safe place ... and a random bolt of lightning struck.”

Oros and camp director Gerald Reed said they, like many Scout leaders, had attended a association training program known as National Camp School, but testified that they received no detailed instruction there regarding lightning storms.

“Nobody seems to be able to come to a consensus of what is safe,” Reed testified. “Nobody says, ‘This is what you do.’”

Reed said he had never heard of the wait-30-minutes rule. He also said a review of Matthew’s death prompted no policy changes: “We didn’t find anything that we could have done better.”

Raymond Braun, the Cradle of Liberty Council’s director of camping, was at the head table with Oros. The decision to dismiss the Scouts was “a fine call,” he said, based on observing the weather.

Korn asked Braun whether the campsite was safer than the dining hall.

“I’m not sure it’s knowable,” replied Braun, who later testified that the camp’s safety policies didn’t address whether Scouts should stay in tents during lightning storms.

Braun also discussed the review conducted by camp officials after Matthew’s death. It dealt solely with the emergency medical response after the lightning strike, not with events beforehand, he said; no one was reprimanded.

“I didn’t see this as a preventable-or-not incident as much as it being an act of God with a rogue lightning bolt,” Braun said in his testimony. “We had done everything in our powers to try to help the young man.”

The Trescas believe their lawsuit could help save other young men – but the slow pace of preliminary proceedings has taken a toll.

Mary Tresca cried as she spoke of carrying on a tradition of buying each of her four children – including Matthew – a new tree ornament each Christmas. She sometimes has trouble wading through the latest batch of legal papers.

“I can see why people don’t do it,” she said of suing the Boy Scouts. “But I can be very persistent. It’s for every boy who’s going to wrap himself into the Scouts the way Matthew did. I want to protect those boys.”

Some local Scout councils do a good job with lightning safety, noted Richard Kithil of the National Lightning Safety Institute.

One that wins praise is the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Cherokee Area Council. A now-deceased safety buff, Jack Wright, drafted a detailed lightning-safety plan for the council, and it invested in storm-alert equipment at its Skymont camp, including a computer that accesses National Weather Service radar and a device that can detect lightning 300 miles away.

Bill Fisher, a council troop leader, said the monitoring system cost $500 – “that’s nothing in comparison to providing safety to people” – and was established to honor a Scout killed by lightning at Skymont 20 years ago. He was puzzled that national association officials hadn’t pressed other councils to take similar steps.

“That’s frustrating for me, because I sit here wondering how many more boys are we going to lose before we make the change,” Fisher said. “It’s just not that hard.”

The Trescas’ suit, which may go to trial later this year, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages; jurors would decide the amount if the Trescas prevail.

A second lightning suit is pending against the Boy Scouts in western New York. The family of James Rozwood has filed a $50 million claim against the association and Iroquois Trail Council in connection with a July 2001 strike that hit Rozwood, then 16, at a Scout camp rifle range, leaving him a quadriplegic who communicates by blinking his eyes.

The Rozwoods, like the Trescas, allege that the Scouts lacked an effective lightning-safety plan and disregarded weather developments. Scout officials deny any negligence.

Last summer, there were two fatal lightning incidents on Scout expeditions, killing an Eagle Scout at a mountain shelter in Utah and a Scout and a leader in California.

The National Weather Service says about 70 Americans have been killed annually by lightning in recent decades. But deaths have declined in the past few years; experts say one reason may be growing interest among major outdoor recreation groups – including the NCAA, Little League Baseball and golfing associations – in updating safety procedures.

“We know a lot more about lightning than we used to,” said Holle. “In that context, the Scouts seem not to be very advanced. They’re almost resistant. I can’t say why.”

Kim Langille-Bushy, from St. Charles, Ill., became a lightning-safety advocate after a bolt injured her son at a YMCA camp in Michigan. She works with schools, camps and youth groups, and says the Boy Scouts are lagging on the issue.