Your body would divert blood to your vital organs and away from your extremities.
You’d begin hyperventilating and shivering uncontrollably, rendering your limbs virtually useless. Shortly after toppling into the drink, you’d develop a massive headache, similar to one you get from scarfing ice cream too fast, as your body tried to keep your brain from freezing by sending a rush of blood. The water is around 28 degrees and would chill your body 25 times faster than air of the same temperature. If you weren’t rescued within an hour and a half, tops, you’d probably freeze to death just like the victims of the Titanic did. The guy suffocated.īut what if you were to end up trapped in another body of water - say, the North Atlantic a day after your cruise ship set sail from the terminal at Pier 88? His barrel got ensnared by the powerful current and couldn’t be retrieved for 16 hours. But the water beneath Niagara is agitated, making it more airy and able to slightly cushion a fall.īut even if you survived, you might get trapped behind the falls - which is what happened to a daredevil in 1930. Smacking into still water would be similar to hitting concrete, and your ribs would shatter - spearing your organs - and your skull would be crushed. Humans can survive a fall of up to 40 feet, according to NASA, but dropping 180 feet - the height of the falls - at 70 miles per hour onto a solid surface would not be good. The worst outcome would obviously be hitting the rocks below. Let’s say you wanted to take an intentional plunge, as folks did back in the early 1900s, when going over Niagara Falls in a barrel was a popular stunt. Its operator, Betty Lou Oliver, dropped 75 stories while sitting in the car’s corner and lived, suffering only broken bones. In 1945, a wayward plane slammed into the Empire State Building, damaging an elevator. push their way through your body.”īest practice if you’re trapped in a plunging elevator is to get low by lying flat on the floor, distributing your body weight. You’d only slow yourself by about a mile per hour, and when you did hit the ground, the force would make “your organs. But if it did happen, you probably wouldn’t die a “horrible, flattened death,” as the authors write.Īssuming the elevator fits snugly in the shaft, as it should, the air beneath the car couldn’t escape the abyss, creating an air cushion that would slow your descent.Īnd the urban legend that claims you can save yourself by jumping at the exact moment the car hits the bottom? Hogwash.
#Death by degrees coins free
Most elevators today have safety brakes that stop them, making a free fall unlikely.
And the metal box goes screaming down the shaft for 60 stories.īelieve it or not, you’d have a pretty good chance of survival. Imagine you’re in an elevator near the top of a Midtown skyscraper. The authors explore what would happen if you were eaten by a shark or if you fell into a black hole, but some of the deadly scenarios explored in the book speak to specific New York-centric anxieties - such as elevator horror stories. Who could blame locals for having a morbid curiosity about some of the more unusual ways to bite it? For those people, there’s “ And Then You’re Dead,” a scientific investigation into novel ways to die by Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty. From tumbling air conditioners to defective sidewalk grates to deli salad-bar tuna, there’s a random death potentially waiting around every corner in New York City.