We all know (thanks to the SD) that you can’t save yourself by jumping at the last second if you are in a falling elevator. But could you save yourself by jumping up and grabbing onto something attached to the ceiling as soon as the elevator started to fall, then hanging on until after impact? Why or why not?
Hmm… lessee…
Elevators aren’t known for their cathedral-like 19th Century high ceilings, and your feet might only be a foor or two off the floor. The crashed elevator would probably be significantly less tall than it was before, so you’d hit the floor anyway before your grip was inevitably (and brutally quickly) broken by the sudden deceleration. So you’d not only be dead, but you’d probably be dead and also have sprained fingers.
The same force that will squish you and not let you save yourself by jumping in the air will quite easily make sure you will not be able to hang on when it finally hits the bottom.
It’s not that easy to hang by your arms. Now imagine you weigh five times as much.
Most likely not becuase the force necessary to hang onto the bar would be far greater than any human could muster. You would have no chance at holding onto the bar, and simply would go splat on the floor. The best position in a falling elevator is bent over with your head between your legs kissing your ass good-bye.
Luckily elevators today (and forever for that matter) have a fail safe system. If the tension in the cable holding up the elevator is not there brakes clamp down on the guides preventing the elevator from moving.
I beleive the best recourse in a free falling elevator is to lay down on the elevator floor.
If you’re falling fast enough to be killed while standing on the floor of the elevator, you’re falling fast enough to be ripped lose from whatever you were holding on to on the ceiling. Then you would impact the floor with the same result. Even if you managed (highly unlikely) to keep a grip with your hands, I don’t know if your arms would actually be ripped off but they would certainly be pulled from their sockets.
I recall reading of a sea-faring punishment where the guilty party’s limbs were tied to the yard arm and he was thrown from that height. I believe the first drop usually resulted in dislocated limbs the second (or third) in the limbs being torn from the body. How good’s your grip?
Unless when the elevator hits bottom, the broken cable (also on its way down) slices through the elevator and promptly cuts you in half… :eek:
I just now remembred where I read it.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenario/1289266.html
Hmm, the last paragraph mentions the jumping bit, but oddly gives the wrong reason why it doesn’t work.
I agree with lying down as your best option, but would submit that if you’re truly in free-fall, lying down would be impossible. (I realize that a falling elevator would not be freely falling due to contact with the walls of the elevator shaft)
To wit:
This is what happens when people learn physics from Bugs Bunny cartoons. :rolleyes:
Right. A few months ago, an elevator in Manhattan actually fell. People inside the building thought a bomb had gone off, the shock from impact was so big.
*Mythbusters * explored the idea of jumping up at the moment before the elevator hits bottom about two years ago.
Even if you could know when to jump, they showed that you’d be pretty well mashed. Their test elevator was completely destroyed, and that was a fall of just six or so stories. And there’s the trick - you’re in a box with solid walls, so you have no visual cue of when to try jumping.
Wouldn’t it be better to remain standing, so your legs can act as shock absorbers? OK, maybe “crumple zone” would be a more apt description, but it should reduce stress to more vital organs.
Would standing on your head help?
Makes NO difference. IF the fail-safe cage arrest system fails you’ll be watchting the grass roots grow for the underside.
Bill Nye also busted this one, but before he got his own show. On Almost Live he rigged up an egg in a tiny elevator shaft to jump up as the little elevator fell. Buster fared better.
I think that you could spread your legs, bend forward as far as you can, and kiss your ass goodbye.
To counteract your downward momentum, you would need to be strong enough that you could jump approximately as high as the starting point of the elevator’s fall. If you could do this, and you could time it just perfectly, and the elevator did not collapse on impact, you could theoretically optimize your jump such that you just exactly counteract your downward momentum and survive.
But if you were strong enough to jump as high as the starting point of the fall, you would probably be built tough enough to survive the fall from that height in the first place. So no need to jump just before the car hits the bottom; just brace yourself like you would for one of your normal 6-story-jump landings.
I don’t buy that. A failure is not always fatal. It depends on how far up you are, how the cage arrest fails (there is such thing as a partial failure), how well the shaft is ventilated, what’s at the bottom (maybe a huge pile of the severed cable?), etc.
I remember a physics test question where we had to determine the parameters of a spring that would allow an elevator car of a certain weight to decelerate slow enough to allow the passengers to survive. At the time I remembe thinking, “I wonder why they don’t do that?” Later it occured to me that it would be impractical. Not only would you have to build teh big-ass spring, but it would be in the way of the mechanicals, and you’d have to design the elevator car itself to withstand a high-G deceleration, etc. Much simpler to design brakes.
If I recall correctly, the big pile of cable at the bottom was speculated as the cause of the survival of a woman who free-fell in an elevator back in WWII when a B-25 hit the Empire State Building.
(after Googling…) From this link: