Lethal jump height?

This may not help you but at uni they teach us that a fall of twice your own height (for a young adult) is an indicator for major trauma.
 
Depends how you jump, on what surface you land and how you land. And also there's luck.
 
Asguard said:
This may not help you but at uni they teach us that a fall of twice your own height (for a young adult) is an indicator for major trauma.
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But we're talking about landing in water. When I was learning to swim the "high board" was ten feet above the water. I never saw anyone get injured at all, no matter how inept or scared they were. You can just step off the edge and land safely. It would have to be a true accident where you were drunk, or something like that.

But it doesn't have to be too much higher. I know a guy who dived off a second-story balcony into a pool when he was a teenager. What's that, fifteen or twenty feet? Broke his neck and he's a quadriplegic, just limited mobility in his arms and hands.
 
actually drunks do better out of high falls than sober people, probably because you dont tense up as much when your drunk. The champion syndrome makes no alowance for what you land on (infact drowning is another indicater) because they want to catch all but thats on land

as for diving that depends on the hardness of the water, how you land and most importantly how deep the pool is. Its really an impossable question to answer because it is situation dependent. You may land belly first off a diving board and die (from internal injuries or disemboyment) or you may be compleatly safe. You may fall from a third story of a building drunk and survive because you are relaxed and land on soft ground and the load is spread over your whole body or you may fall from a ladder and land on your head and sever your spinal cord at C3-5 and die. It will depend on age (soft bones will bend insted of breaking), what you land on or in and how you land. Its impossable to give a definitive answer
 
When I was kid, we used to jump from buildings. There was a kid who can jump from especially high. For example, he jumped several times from the top of a 6 floor building into a pile of rice, and he jumped from the top of a 4-floor building onto just plain (dirt) ground. Nothing happened to him.
 
2 window washers fell 47 stores in NYC, one of them survived and will be able to walk. So we can put the lethal height to 48 stores...
 
it all depends on the landing and mass of object falling...as well as air current at that instant of landing
 
Asguard said:
You may land belly first off a diving board and die (from internal injuries or disemboyment)
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What's that? Did you mean to say disembowelment? O.O

temur said:
When I was kid, we used to jump from buildings. There was a kid who can jump from especially high. For example, he jumped several times from the top of a 6 floor building into a pile of rice, and he jumped from the top of a 4-floor building onto just plain (dirt) ground. Nothing happened to him.
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Holy crap. That's so cool.

Not if you interlock your fingers or cup one fist, and punch a hole for your head while squeezing your ears to slow the water hammer
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What is the water hammer?
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7172647.stm

A New York window cleaner who survived a 47-storey fall from a skyscraper last month is making a gradual recovery - in what doctors say is a "miracle".

Alcides Moreno, 37, tumbled some 500ft (150m) to the ground in a scaffolding accident that killed his brother.

Mr Moreno suffered severe brain, spine and abdomen injuries and both his legs, his right arm and ribs were broken.

But after undergoing a series of surgeries he is now awake, able to talk and is expected to walk again.

"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," Dr Philip Barie, a surgeon at New York's Presbyterian Hospital where Mr Moreno is being treated, was quoted as saying by the New York Times newspaper.

"Above 10 floors, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue... this is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving," Dr Barie said.
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did he hit anything on the way down? I can't imagine a body not splitting open/exploding from that height when hitting concrete.
 
visceral_instinct yes its possable, especially onto water, all you have to do is put more force on the skin of the abdoman than it can take, there is nothing else protcting the organs.
 
Depends what you land in/on. There's a fellow who jumped from a burning Lancaster over Germany during WW2, and fell 22,000 feet without a parachute (because it was burned and useless). He landed in a deep snow-drift and broke his ankle. When the Germans captured him, he told them he had fallen several thousand feet and they weren't inclined to believe him until he to them to the spot and showed them the big hole in the snow where he'd landed.
There was another case in the 70's/80's, I think in Yugoslavia, where a woman fell 34,000 feet and survived, though with serious injuries.
 
I have herd of WW2 pilots falling out of there plane's and sliding along the ice and surviving. Its all about how fast the stop at the end is
 
Asguard said:
visceral_instinct yes its possable, especially onto water, all you have to do is put more force on the skin of the abdoman than it can take, there is nothing else protcting the organs.
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but wouldn't you have to actually concentrate more force in one small area to do that? I mean if you fell straight down wouldn't the force be on all parts of the body equally?
 
its on the point of contact but you also need to take into account time. Have you ever jumped from a driving board and done a belly wacker (or whatever they are called where ever you live) compared to a propper dive? The potential energy is converted into kentic much quicker if you hit the water flat than angled into it. I have herd of atleast on case of a fat man who jumped off the high board and was split open. The condition of his skin may have contributed to the situation however (i dont know that much about the case), if it wasnt as elastic as normal.
 
High School friend Smithy

was a great diver even winning state diving title. Record score stood for twenty years. He was barely five foot tall and 100 pounds soaking wet. He had talked for years about diving off the cliffs in Acapulco, Mexico. After his freshman year in college at Cornell he and several friends went to Acapulco but the authorities wouldn't let him dive. Smithy stayed there and the others came home with crazy tales of debauchery. They even had pictures and movies. Smithy stayed in Acapulo for a year and came back with proof that he had dived off the cliffs. Seems he got a job at the restaurant and worked his way into befriending the owners and the divers and they trained him to dive into the inlet. His story checked out when the local papers published a story with interviews of the people in Acapulco. Seems he had been written about in the local papers down there as the crazy gringo who dives for fun. Smithy talked about how dangerous the dives were and the injuries the divers had suffered but they still dove because the money was great. I remember when he beefed himself up and somehow stretched to meet the minimum height to join the Marines. He was a grunt and went to Vietnam. On his second tour he was killed on patrol. His name is on the memorial in the town park along ten other hometown men who died in Vietnam.

I just watched a video on MSN Video of some guy in Japan who dove, a belly-flopper, from 35 feet into 12 inches of water and he was none the worse for wear. I remember as a kid the Strates Shows had a daredevil who dove into a tank with six feet of water from a tower of 75 feet, he did five times a day and lived. All this talk about terminal velocity and air resistance and water density and all the other stuff is a bunch of shit. People have died in a bathtub with six inches of water and others have lived after going over Niagara Falls.
 
I just watched a video on MSN Video of some guy in Japan who dove, a belly-flopper, from 35 feet into 12 inches of water and he was none the worse for wear

and hundreds of people here die or are seriously injured diving into rivers from low tree branches and snaping there necks. There is no garentiee in life just statistics.

im wondering why you posted the story about the marrine though
 
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