Some years ago I read an article in Newsweek (just found it here) that talked about the fate of people on the top floors of the WTC during 9/11. Pictures and video footage famously showed a number of people who, instead of being burned to death by approaching flames, chose to jump to their deaths. I distinctly remembered this passage:
I haven’t done the math, but presumably when people jumped from the top floors of the WTC, they impacted the pavement at something close to terminal velocity. It’s been pretty well documented that people who fall from great heights into water tend to die from blunt force trauma, so I would expect the damage from landing on a concrete sidewalk to be at least as bad. But how bad is it? Does a victim’s skin reliably rupture and release “a pink mist of gore?” Have other eyewitnesses corroborated the one cited by Newsweek in the above article?
I should hope that when it happens to me, I should land directly on my head so the very first thing that happens is I won’t be there to experience the rest of what happens to me.
When I read that, I get a picture in my mind like what happens when you throw a water balloon on the sidewalk… but a human body is more durable than a balloon, or does it matter much at those levels of impact?
In Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s 9/11 documentary, there’s a horrific bit (one of many, actually) where the firemen in the lobby of one of the towers are hearing the sound of people hitting the ground outside. It’s fair to say there is a liquid component involved.
He would hit the ground with an impact force of close to 100,000 ft #'s of kinetic energy. So if you set a fully loaded tractor and 58ft trailer square on top of him it might have a similar effect.
I was the first onscene of a terminal velocity impact in a skydive gone bad some years ago. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 125-150 mph onto blacktop. I wasn’t there at actual impact, so can’t speak to the pink mist, but it would not surprise me. A variety of unrecognizeable chunks had spread out in 360 deg, each a red streak ending in a jello mold. Forearm with jagged bone 10-20 feet from a center pile of meat in a jumpsuit.
Yeah, I remember watching that. Something unexpected was how incredibly loud the sound of the impact of the bodies was on hitting the pavement even from inside the WTC lobby where they were filming at the time. It was akin to hearing an anvil land in a dumpster. The two French filmmakers had no idea what they were hearing but the firemen, many of whom had dealt with such situations before, said rather cold & calmly, “Those are jumpers”.
I’m not going to give a link because it would undoubtedly be on a gore site, but I have in fact seen video of a 9/11 jumper impacting, and ‘pink mist’ is indeed an accurate description…
There’s a song about it, amongst the people who ‘jump and die’. Here’s a Youtube: “Blood On the Risers”, AKA “Gory Gory What a Helluva Way to Die” (same link, same song, just different search, which got the same URL). You can get lyrics for that by Googling the words in quotes. You can also get incredibly better recordings looking for video or audio files better than that. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm…
