What are the chances of surviving a 25-foot fall?

Lucky teenager was caught before she hit

A 14-year-old girl survived a 25foot fall from an amusement park ride in Queensbury, N.Y., on Saturday when several good Samaritans caught her before she hit the ground.

Would she have survived the fall if no one had been there to catch her? Possibly, said an emergency room doctor. “The probability of surviving a 25-foot fall — even into the arms of a crowd — is influenced by many factors, including your speed, as well as host of many other variables,” Robert Glatter of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City said in Forbes magazine.

He said falls from a distance higher than 30 feet have a high probability of inflicting serious injuries involving the spleen, liver and lungs, along with blunt chest trauma and rib fractures.

Falls from more than 20 feet usually result in a trip to the emergency room, but even lowlevel falls can cause serious head injuries, according to the American College of Surgeons.

The median lethal distance for falls is four stories or 48 feet, according to the reference book

Trauma Anesthesia. This means that 50% of patients who fall four stories will die. The chance of death increases to 90% when the fall is seven stories, the book said.

As for what kills people when they fall, “most people who fall from a height die because they fracture their spine near the top and so transect the aorta which carries blood out of the heart,” Sean Hughes, professor of surgery at Imperial College in London, told The Guardian.

Landing on your side might be the best way to survive a fall, Hughes said. It doesn’t take much of a fall to cause damage. “From a height of 3 meters (roughly 10 feet), you could fracture your spine,” Hughes said. “At around 10 meters (about 30 feet), you’re looking at very serious injuries.”

Each year, about 424,000 people die because of falls, making falls the second-leading cause of unintentional injury death, after road traffic injuries, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

About 37.3 million falls are severe enough to require medical attention each year, the WHO says.