Can you survive elevator fall

You jump at just the right moment, and lift off just as the elevator hits the floor. At this moment, you are to our camera moving upwards with what we will call your jump speed.

At this crucial moment, just before it hits the ground, the elevator is falling with a certain elevator speed. Because of your leap, you are falling more slowly than the elevator. The speed at which you hit the floor of the suddenly stopped elevator is the elevator speed minus your jump speed. As an equivalent, we can think in terms of height: how high was the elevator when it fell, and how high can you jump? Falling one storey 3m : timed right, you hit the ground as if you fell from 80cm.

Falling three storeys 9m : you hit the ground as if you fell 4. Your predicament is upgraded from possibly dead to alive but injured.

Some have suggested lying down in the lift, because it will distribute the force of impact over your whole body. This is a terrible idea - protect your brain! Some part of your body must absorb the impact, but head injury is the primary cause of death in falls.

Let your legs take the hit. Falling five storeys 15m : you hit the ground as if you fell 9 metres, which is the difference between probably dead and probably alive. In fact, elevators have a fatality rate of 0. But when the steel doors close, and seal you inside one square meter of space, you might find yourself picturing the worst case scenario.

How can you survive a falling elevator, if it comes to that? This is an average office building elevator. It works a regular week of 10 hours a day and makes , trips per year. Pretty hard-working. You spend quite a bit of time with this guy. Finding yourself in a free-falling elevator is quite rare.

But if, by fluke, it happens to you, what should you do? Can you save yourself by jumping up in the air? Before we get to your survival strategy, let me take you behind-the-scenes of an elevator.

What makes it so safe? Modern elevators feature a variety of safety backups like multiple safety cables. Even if by some very unfortunate accident the motor fails and absolutely all metal cables fall down, the electromagnetic brakes will activate and stop the elevator from plunging to the ground floor. The elevator is falling. Theoretically, if you jump at just the right moment as the elevator is hitting the floor, you slow down the speed of your fall, and that gives you a soft landing.

So, you're in a falling elevator. Life has given you proverbial lemons, and you have seconds to make some lemonade or end up as pulp. What to do? Some people advocate jumping upward a split-second prior to impact to reduce your impact speed. Assuming you retain the presence of mind and Olympic reactions to pull this off, however, the best speed reduction you could hope for would be 2 or 3 mph. More likely, you'd hit your head on the ceiling and land badly, exacerbating your injuries.

Another suggestion holds that you should stand with your knees bent to absorb the impact, like a skydiver. Theoretically, your legs would flex as you and the elevator touched down, spreading your body's deceleration over a longer period impact force is proportional to speed and mass, and inversely proportional to time and stopping distance the longer the time spent stopping, the less the force.

The effectiveness of this approach at high speeds, however, remains unclear, and research shows that you would likely be subjecting your knees and legs to greater injury risk at low speeds.

This approach also keeps your body parallel to the lines of force, which increases the chance of bone breakage as you crumple to the floor under high load. With these factors in mind, the consensus view holds that your best bet is to lie flat on your back on the floor and cover your face and head to guard against debris.

Hitting the ground floor in this position spreads the force of impact across your body; it also orients your spine and long bones perpendicular to the impact direction, which will better protect them from crushing damage.

Your thinner bones, like ribs, might still snap like twigs, but you're picking your poison here.