Mega Millions a mega draw

The winning numbers were 4, 8, 15, 25, 47, with 42 being the Mega Ball number.

Heather Dumont and Phil Haberthur had a lot to keep track of Tuesday night when winning numbers were drawn for the Mega Millions lottery. They walked out of a downtown Vancouver store with 180 of the $1 tickets.

When Dumont and Haberthur teamed up with seven other people in their office Tuesday afternoon, they became part of a very busy day at lottery outlets across the nation.

“It’s a really, really big day,” said Scott Kinney, Washington lottery spokesman. “I was on a 10 a.m. conference call with lottery officials from other states, and they were saying that 240,000 tickets were being sold per minute nationally.”

Forty-one states and Washington, D.C., participate in the Mega Millions lottery.

This is just the second time Dumont has played the lottery, she said, but the big jackpot got her attention. Dumont and Haberthur work at the Vancouver office of Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, a Northwest law firm. When an attorney who’d just bought a ticket told Dumont about the jackpot, she and Haberthur got a lottery pool going.

When they were standing in line at the Plaid Pantry at 514 Washington St., the sign in the store window indicated that the Mega Millions jackpot was up to $355 million. That was an increase of more than $100 million in the span of a day.

Haberthur, a Battle Ground resident, said he hadn’t put together a fantasy shopping list.

“Paying off some debts” came to mind, he said about six hours before the winning numbers were scheduled to be drawn. “We’d figure something out.”

Dumont said she’d buy a house with her share of the nine-way split, and “I’d adopt three kids.” She is the guardian of three young relatives, explained Dumont, also a Battle Ground resident.

Lottery players select five numbers from a field of 56, plus an additional number from a field of 46. The odds of a person having all six numbers on a ticket are about 1 in 175 million. If nobody wins the jackpot, it accumulates; drawings are held twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

o Pat and Dick Warren of Hoquiam hold the record for the largest jackpot in Washington, a $93 million Mega Millions win in November 2002.

o In fiscal year 2010, about 21 cents from every lottery dollar spent in Washington went to education.

SOURCE: walottery.com

The Mega Millions jackpot — which started at $12 million — has gone unclaimed for about two months, Kinney said.

“On Dec. 7, this jackpot was $74 million. Ticket sales that day in Washington were 196,376,” the lottery spokesman said Tuesday afternoon. “Today at 1 p.m., Washington sales were at 643,530.”

A winner has the option to collect the jackpot in 26 annual payments before taxes. If an immediate payout is preferred, the winner can take a lump sum. After taxes were deducted from that $355 million jackpot, somebody who wanted to take the money and run would have $224 million.

And you could run for quite a while. One of the things $224 million could get you is about 75 million gallons of gasoline; in a car that gets 25 mpg, that’s a 1.8 billion-mile road trip. (Individual mileage may vary.)

If the Mega Millions jackpot were to go unclaimed and roll over again, Friday’s payoff would be around $480 million, Kinney said.

And that would figure to draw even more business.

“I try to buy two tickets a week, one for each draw,” said Adam Trent of Vancouver. But he was planning to buy 10 tickets during Tuesday’s lunch break.

“I know 10 people who don’t usually play, but they will at this level,” Trent said, including one who buys 40 tickets.

If Trent ever does hit the jackpot, he wouldn’t have a shopping list at all. Quite the opposite. He has his own “take the money and run” vision.

“I think I’d be the only person to get rid of all my possessions,” Trent said. “I’d travel for 10 years.”