There’s no formula to surviving a fall

A seven-year-old boy tumbled out of an eighth-storey window at a Toronto birthday party Thursday, breaking several bones but suffering no life-threatening injuries.

The boy fell about 21 metres onto a patch of wet grass. By the time police arrived he was conscious and able to describe his wounds.

“He landed right over here on the ground,” Toronto police Sgt. Claudio Martelluzzi told reporters outside the Downsview building. “Fortunately, it appears that the ground was saturated and broke some of his fall.”

Studies show falls from that height can often be fatal. But the boy’s survival, while perhaps unusual, is no wild anomaly. Researchers going back decades have charted cases where children and adults alike have survived falls from sometimes astounding heights. At the same time, falls of not much more than a metre have proven fatal.

Jim Hamilton, an amateur fall enthusiast, keeps an online compendium of free fall survival stories. Among the recent incidents chronicled on his site are the story of a 20-year-old New Zealander who survived a 13-storey fall from his apartment balcony and a 23-year-old Argentinian woman who lived after falling 23 storeys out of a hotel room onto the roof of a car. Researchers say factors including age, weight, landing surface and body position on impact can play as much of a role in fall survival as height.

Children, for example, are more likely to fall head first, according to some studies, likely because of the relative weight of their skulls. But they’re also less likely to suffer catastrophic bone breaks than are the elderly.

Despite a growing body of research on human falls from heights, even basic facts about why some people survive and others don’t remain in dispute. The basic physics are simple enough. But in field studies, researchers have found massive variations in what matters and why when it comes to mortality. For children, one study found the cut-off for mortality is usually around three storeys. Anything above that and the risk of death increases dramatically. Another study pegged the cutoff at about two storeys, finding that children under 15 were likely to survive the vast majority of falls of six metres or less.

There is no formula for determining fall fatality. There is, in other words, no red survival line on any chart. When it comes to falls, sometimes people die. They bang their heads on concrete. They snap their spines on impact. But other times, lucky times, like the time a little boy, playing at a birthday party, slipped out a Toronto window, they live, and, in this case at least, everyone should be grateful for that.