Ever jump off the roof when you were a kid?
no.
I know I’m not the only person here who jumps just as the elevator starts to go down. Am I? :o
[sup]Wheee!!![/sup]
But only if no one else is on the elevator (or it’s only my very bestest friends who are almost as weird as I am).
It probably wouldn’t save my life if the elevator was falling, but it would be a lot more fun that way! Until you land, and then it would hurt.
Really? I used to do it all the time.
Anyway, jumping off the roof of a single-storey house or from the second storey of a building will generally not be fatal. I never so much as twisted an ankle doing it as a kid. There would be no need to jump up, if the lift only dropped a single storey.
CurtC said:
This article is mainly about people who died in the elevators in the WTC on 9/11 but it does say this:
I don’t think it’s something that happens too often because modern elevators have emergency brakes.
This bad astronomy article goes into a bit more detail than Cecil’s column.
The argument about lying down or standing up in the falling elevator is probably redundant because you would immediately fly to the ceiling and stick there for the duration of the drop:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec96/851972434.Ph.r.html
I reckon the only way to survive an elevator drop is as follows:
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as soon as the cables break you are going to be headed upwards toward the ceiling at an extremely quick speed
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on your way up, try to do a double footed kick at the side wall of the lift (about a foot from the ceiling) to bust a hole in the wall
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if you suceed in busting a hole you need to get your legs out through the hole and drape your legs over, locking yourself into position so you have your back facing towards the floor and your face looking at the (rapidly approaching) ceiling. Put your arms up to protect yourself from the ceiling - you will probably be a bit winded when you crash into the ceiling but if you use your arms properly, you won’t get knocked unconscious. Then, attempt to pin your arms against two other walls so you will be spreadeagled. Hold yourself rigid in this position and brace for the crash.
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if you don’t suceed in busting a hole try to spreadeagle yourself anyway but you probably won’t make it - you really need a hole, something to lock your legs into. Either way, you’re going to hit the ceiling at a fast speed so you need to steel yourself for that.
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when the elevator hits the ground two seconds later, your legs will probably whip round and you will kick out the rest of the wood from above the hole you made. You will do a somersault and end up falling to the ground on your feet. Land and roll into the fall.
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duck when you come out of the fall because the ceiling of the elevator will probably come crashing down to some extent
Hmm…sounds good in theory
Unlikely, since the passengers and the elevator will be falling at a similar rate.
I don’t see why a free fall in an elevator would be any different from a free fall without an elevator, so the best course of action would be to stand with your knees and back slightly flexed, head loose, and shout really loud on impact. Or maybe if it was a really big elevator you could try to get some lateral motion going.
Now, what I really want to know - if 9 cats were trapped in a falling elevator, how many would survive ?
“Modern”, in this case, meaning “since 1853”.
That article is wrong. It says:
The Straight Dope is for fighting ignorance, not spreading it. I can see that since your legs are pushing on the floor pre-break, it might push you somewhat towards the ceiling, which you would bump into if the elevator’s falling drag didn’t take over first. But as soon as the elevator approached its terminal velocity, you would be on the floor again. At terminal velocity, you would have your full weight on the floor.
In the Mythbusters episode, someone here posted that they removed the elevator doors on all the floors for maximum speed, but in reality, the elevator might actually slow down as it approached the bottom because it’s compressing the air underneath it, and the air won’t be able to get out of the way that easily.
Such elevator shafts as I have seen open have also had large coil springs at the base.
boing!!
True. I don’t know why Mythbusters performed the experiment that way, because it’s not a real-world test. If you were in an elevator that failed, the doors wouldn’t all be open.
Several things would work in your favor in this scenario:
- The cushion of air being compressed below the car as it falls.
- The car’s counterweight cable, which would be coiling at the bottom of the shaft and (I presume) would provide some bit of cushion, depending on what it’s made of.
- Friction between the walls of the shaft and the walls of the car.
- The partial vacuum above the car, exerting a slight upward force (I’m least certain about the possibility of this one).
All these factors (except maybe #4) came into play to save the life of Betty Lou Oliver when she fell in an Empire State Building elevator in 1945, as mentioned upthread (and as I was first made aware of by manhattan on Another Site).
This doesn’t happen…remember when astronaut training included modified airline jets going into hyperbolic trajectories to give the trainees the feeling of weightlessness for a short period of time? They did not not get stuck to the ceiling, they had to push off the walls and floor of the plane to get to the ceiling or any other part of the plane. The same would be true for an elevator.
Are these Schrodinger’s cats?
It’s uncertain.
This is the same as your argument #1. A vacuum does not actually exert a force towards the vacuum, it just exerts less of a force away from it, such that the greater pressure outside pushes objects toward the vacuum.
And I was neglecting terminal velocity in my calculation, which is valid if the elevator is sufficiently heavy. Remember, different objects have different terminal velocities, and assuming that the elevator is sealed, the terminal velocity of a human is completely irrelevant.
[quopte=Fiver]I don’t know why Mythbusters performed the experiment that way, because it’s not a real-world test. If you were in an elevator that failed, the doors wouldn’t all be open.
[/quote]
IIRC, they mentioned the air cushion effect as a possible contributing factor to the woman surviving the Empire State accident. As for why they took the doors off the shaft, well, let’s just say “scientific rigor” is a fairly unknown concept to that program, and ultimately, they want to blow something up at the end of the day. In this episode, they settled for crushing an elevator - recall the elevator cab was shrunk to about six feet tall after the crash.
I don’t think the Mythbusters removed the elevator doors. I think they were removed (along with just about everything else except the walls themselves) prior to the eventual destruction of the building.
Ask Newman.