It's Monday morning and you're back at work after a weekend of sweet, sweet freedom.
With coffee in hand you walk into the elevator lobby and then step into the first available
car going up.
After thirty seconds of moving steadily upwards, your elevator suddenly jolts to a stop.
Confused, you press the button for your floor again but the elevator doesn't respond.
Then, suddenly, you hear something very worrisome- a distinct snapping sound followed by a loud
crashing sound against the top of your elevator.
You realize that one of the steel cables holding the elevator up has snapped, and come crashing
down the shaft.
You can hear a second cable starting to break, and nervously you reach for your cell phone-
you need help, and you need it now!
Unfortunately you never changed your cell phone service provider from T-mobile, so you
don't normally get service through a wet paper towel, let alone the steel walls of the elevator
and the concrete shaft beyond it.
In a full-blown panic now, you reach for the emergency call box, a land line that's typically
wired directly to emergency services, but as you open the box you're horrified to discover
that T-mobile runs this line too!
Even the landline has no service, because T-mobile!
Now you hear three more cables snap, and in a heartbeat, you're stuck inside an elevator
very quickly plummeting to the basement level.
Can you survive the next few seconds?
Can you really survive a falling elevator?!
Every year ten million people die from falling elevators.
Just kidding, elevators are actually one of the safest methods of transportation, and
have a fatality rate of .00000015% per trip.
In the United States, only 27 people die on average each year in elevator accidents, and
almost all of these either involve people accidentally stepping into an empty elevator
shaft due to a door malfunction, or getting caught between a floor and the moving elevator.
The latter can be quite horrific, as the upwards or downwards moving elevator shears the victim
in half.
The good news is that almost no fatalities occur due to elevators actually falling, which
is pretty impressive given the estimated 18 billion elevator trips Americans take every
year.
Compare that to the 12,000 people who die every year from falling down stairs.
That's right, stairs are the real killer here, and right now they're plotting to end you.
Just think about that the next time your friend shames you for wanting to take the elevator
up two flights instead of the stairs, you’re not being lazy, you’re just playing the
odds on how not to die.
So what are the odds realistically that an elevator would fall out of control?
Well, pretty negligible to be honest.
The vast majority of accidents that have occurred due to falling elevators have almost all been
during the construction phase, or during maintenance, when some key safety features may not have
been implemented yet or taken offline temporarily.
Before the elevator falls, it must suffer a failure of all four to eight cables which
keep it held aloft.
That's because just one of those cables is strong enough on its own to hold the elevator,
so unless they all go, there's just no way that elevator is going to come crashing down.
If by some miracle all of the cables keeping the elevator suspended are sheared off, perhaps
because of Godzilla or Decepticon attack in your city, then the elevator must still experience
a failure of the electromagnetic brakes on the car itself.
These brakes are designed to automatically kick in when the elevator exceeds a certain
speed, making them almost foolproof.
They can even slow a free falling car down within just two or three stories, making the
odds of a catastrophic crash pretty low.
Automatic switches on the track itself can also kick in if an elevator is moving too
fast and help stop the car.
If though all these should fail, then finally at the bottom there is typically a crash pad
of sorts which is designed to crumple when struck by an elevator and help decelerate
the elevator to what is hopefully survivable speeds.
In fact many modern automobiles feature crumple zones, or areas on the front of the vehicle
that are designed to give way structurally in a high speed collision and 'crumple', thus
reducing the kinetic energy being transferred to the cab, and inevitably, you.
Hydraulic lift elevators lack some of these safety features, but these elevators only
have a maximum height of three to four stories.
You can often find these elevators in apartment buildings, and due to their limited height,
even if one of these were to fail there's little chance of the fall being fatal.
Let's say though that you're one in a trillion.
You have the worst luck in the universe, maybe you were born under a ladder while your mother
opened an umbrella indoors and a black cat crossed her path.
Unlucky you shows up to work one day, gets inside the elevator, rides up a few floors
and suddenly, you're in free fall.
Can you survive?
What's the first thing you think about when you think about surviving a falling elevator?
Odds are it's probably trying to jump for your life.
In theory, it's a solid move- the fall isn't what's going to kill you, but rather the sudden
stop at the end.
If you can somehow lower the speed your body hits that basement floor with, then you'll
suffer less injury.
Thus, by jumping at the last second before impact, you're negating some of your downwards
velocity with muscle-powered upwards velocity.
Pretty solid science.
Except, it kind of isn't.
That's because unless you're an NBA player with serious ups, you're only going to decelerate
by about two to three mile an hour, which is going to do exactly diddly squat versus
your fifty seven mile an hour falling speed.
Also there's the fact that when you're in a free falling elevator, you yourself are
also at free fall, and gravity isn't keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground.
You'll feel weightless, and you might as well be, because trying to plant your feet on the
ground and get enough upwards push to actually jump is going to be nigh impossible.
Then there's also the more obvious problem- how in the world are you going to time your
jump?
Most elevators have no way of showing you which floor you're currently falling through-
that fast count down you always see in the movies is there to build tension and drama.
In real life you'd have no idea what floor you're even on, and no way to judge when you
should jump once you near the bottom.
Jump too soon and you'll come back down having negated zero of your downwards velocity.
Jump too late, and well, you know, you're dead.
If jumping isn't the answer, then maybe you can take a tip from paratroopers and simply
flex your knees?
This theory states that you should square your body up and then flex your knees so your
legs are at about forty five degrees.
This then should allow your legs to act like springs, lessening the force traveling up
your body from the impact.
Paratroopers often use this flexed knee approach, and when they're falling at a leisurely six
to eight miles an hour, it helps them avoid ankle injuries or broken legs.
You however, are making a mad dash to the bottom of the elevator shaft at dozens of
miles an hour.
Flexing your knees in this way isn't going to reduce much of the force traveling up your
body.
Worse, it's actually placing most of your bones perpendicular to the floor and making
them much more prone to shattering like toothpicks.
Clearly, not an ideal situation.
So then how can you survive a fall?
Well, it turns out that the best way to survive a free falling elevator is to lay down flat
on the floor, placing your hands behind your head to protect your skull from falling debris
after the sudden stop.
By laying flat on the floor you'll spread out the force of the impact across a much
larger area of your body, and it actually gives most of your bones a decent chance of
making it intact, even if smaller bones like your ribs snap like twigs.
This technique comes with its own problems though, mostly that just like trying to jump
at the last second, because you're in free fall it's going to be incredibly difficult
to lay down flat.
Also there's the issue of putting your brain basically inches away from the impact, and
the brain is one of two organs you really want to keep intact to have a chance of surviving.
All in all though, this technique really does offer the best chance for survival- especially
if you're on the chunkier side.
If that's the case then you want to lie down with your chunkiest bits towards the floor,
as all the body fat will act like a shock absorber and dramatically increase your odds
of survival!
So there you go, next time someone complains about your weight tell them that in an elevator
crash you'll live, and they'll die.
Also, ignore them, because you shouldn't be friends with anyone who complains about your
weight.
Freefalling elevators are kind of one of those catch-22s of life, and even if you do everything
right, there's no guarantee of survival.
The bottom of the elevator floor may turn into a tangled mess of shattered steel on
impact, and with you lying directly on it, you'll end up impaled in a dozen or more places.
Sometimes, just staying upright can save your life, such as the case of Betty Lou Oliver,
world record holder for longest fall survived in an elevator.
In 1945 an American bomber accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building, and the crash
severed the cables holding up Betty Lou's elevator car.
She fell a whopping 75 stories and crashed into the basement floor, and incredibly survived
with some broken bones.
That just goes to show you that life can be so random that sometimes, it just makes no
sense at all.
Laying flat on a falling elevator though is scientifically speaking the best way to survive
a free falling elevator.
With so few elevator accidents of this type around the world though, what you should really
be on the alert for is accidentally stepping through open doors and into an empty elevator
shaft.
Or getting caught by closing doors and being trapped there when the car starts moving.
What we're saying is that really it's not the car who's the real threat here, but rather
the doors.
Though even elevator doors don't compare to the body count that regular old stairs have,
making them the number one killer amongst devices to move us up and down buildings.
Kind of makes you wonder if it's even worth it to use the stairs instead of the elevator
in case of a fire, the way signs always tell you to do....
Hopefully after watching this episode the next time you get stuck in an elevator you'll
breathe a little easier.
Now you know that there's virtually no chance of disaster, though you don't want to end
up like Nicholas White either, who spent 41 hours stuck in a New York City elevator in
2008.
Sometimes though it’s not the fall in the elevator that might kill you, but rather all
the mechanical bits above the elevator that make it work.
In 1903 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a party was being thrown at the Pittsburgh Electric
Mechanical Institute on the sixth and seventh floors.
Eager party-goers, most of them young and in their twenties, packed an elevator on its
way up.
Once getting to the sixth floor, the elevator suddenly jerked violently, and with a horrible
snap the wires holding it up snapped.
The elevator car plummeted six floors down and crashed in a heap of metal- though most
of the occupants survived.
Sadly, that’s when the heavy steel cables and machinery used to hoist the elevator came
crashing down and crushed the survivors.
Most of the bodies were so badly mangled they could only be identified by the clothes they
had been wearing, though miraculously a few of them did survive.
The cause of the accident?
Overloading of a 12 occupancy elevator with 17 passengers- so take note next time you’re
packing in on an elevator.
How would you try to survive a falling elevator?
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