Lately, I’ve been participating in a political roleplay where the Head of State of my nation lives in a penthouse atop a fifty-story apartment building in the heart of the nation’s capital–a mega-city.
I’ve also been playing a lot of GTA IV, which, for those who ain’t played it or know anything about it, takes place in a fictional city based on NYC. One of the player residences available is a very fancy penthouse.
That got me thinking, as a resident of a place (Texastan) where actual “city” (as opposed to vast seas of sprawl) is very rare, and as someone with a MAJOR fear of heights:
Living up that high with an outside deck/balcony seems like it carries a significant risk of one false move (like slipping on water that has sloshed over the side of the swimming pool) causing you to fall off the building and become a heap of parts on the pavement below.
How often do people fall from penthouses? How many people have fallen? What kind of safety measures do the buildings incorporate so people have less of a risk of falling? And, finally, has anyone actually SURVIVED a fall from one?
I don’t know the answrrs you’re looking for, but when I look up at the penthouses set atop building in Manhattan, I notice that they are mostly set back from the edge. In fact, there are often tiers, with sort of “sub-penthouses” on lower floors that are like large balconies with a lot of open sky, just not on the top floor.
The penthouses also often have plants at the borders, too, making it harder to get to and fall over the edge.
But if you have an accessible wall on your penthouse where you put your telescope for looking down at the hoi polloi (as in The Man in the Glass Booth and other penthouse-set dramas), and you slip on your spilled Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild, or pool water and manage to fall off the edge, you probably wouldn’t plunge to the street far below a la King Kong, but would likely land on the next penthouse down. Which could still be fatal.
Here’s a story of someone falling from a 17th story apartment. I don’t really see that a penthouse would entail more risk than a regular balcony would. There are railings, and those of a penthouse are probably better constructed than is typical.
Note in the article that NYC has a “Department of Buildings” that stepped into action after this event. Building safety codes are serious business in NYC.
I don’t see why a penthouse should be especially dangerous. They have railings around balconies. If they don’t (to give an effect like an “infinity pool” where there is no visible barrier), then what you normally have is a small (3 or 4 feet) drop down to a lower level, which then has a barrier tucked out of sight below the “edge”.
Not quite from the Penthouse, but basically the same idea:
Man survived 47-story fall from skyscraper
NY man jumps from 39-story skyscraper and survives
There were also about half a dozen guys who basically got shot out of their bombers in WWII and fell about 20,000 feet or so and survived. Makes these skyscraper falls seem tiny by comparison.
Here in Thailand, farangs (Westerners) jumping from condos has become a meme, particularly in the Sin City of Pattaya on our Eastern Seaboard. I guess many are legitimate suicides, usually involving a bad romance, usually with a bargirl. Some guys may come here with the intention of suicide after one big blow-out in the bars and brothels before taking that final step.
But some would seem to be “helped.” I recall one falling death in which the police tried to claim the farang actually died while sitting in the wondow, and after an hour or so the body shifted enough to where it tumbled out.
Remembered too: I used to live in Honolulu, where there are many tall buildings and window washing is a big industry. The window washers usually left their scaffolding up when they left at the end of the day, and there were many cases of Bozos getting drunk and falling to their deaths while trying to play Spider-Man on the ropes.
And one time this serviceman stationed at a base on Oahu checked into a Waikiki hotel and was having wild sex with some girl out on the balcony when they both tumbled off and fell to their deaths on the street below. Compounding the tragedy was the authorities having to notify the man’s wife on the mainland to tell her. I knew one of the ambulance attendants who was on the scene, and he informed me that the guy still had his erection. So I guess you could say that he … wait for it … came and went at the same time.
My suspicion is that, unless you are very tall, it’s probably about impossible to just “slip” over the top of a railing. In order to get your body over the rail, your center of gravity has to go up and over the rail. And since your center of gravity is based on how much the various parts of your body weigh, if your center of gravity is lower than the top of the rail, then no matter how much of your upper body goes over the top of the rail, it’s less than half your weight and insufficient to pull you over (treating the rail as a fulcrum).
So the basic physics is that short of giving a hop, you’re not going over.
There was also a recent case in Bangkok where a Thai man was in his condo with his mistress. A neighbor called his wife, who had returned to her village upcountry to give birth there to their baby. She returned quickly to surprise the couple, the mistress tried to hide by hanging off the balcony, only to end up falling to her death.
Oh, and I’ll mention one more, because this one is unusual in that all parties lived to see another day, although they may still be limping a bit. A couple of months ago, a trio of Aussies checked into a hotel down South in Phuket. They promptly got into some drunken shenanigans out on the balcony, and all three fell off! But they weren’t up too high, just the third floor, and all lived.
Story here. Excerpt: A hotel staff member said, “They were hanging out and drinking on the hotel balcony. They were chatting loudly and teasing each other, pushing each other around, when, unexpectedly, all three fell off the balcony to the court yard.”
