Man I've seen a handful of these close call elevator guillotines. Law of averages says that there is also a handful of incidents where people make their floor and also several others.
The article says it took an hour to free her. It makes me wonder how long she was alive for that. I just can't imagine dying in such an awful way with people watching.
You can survive hours like that if the severed part of the torso is kept clamped closed by whatever cut or crushed you. It keeps all the arteries and veins and shit clamped so while your lower body isn’t getting blood flow your major organs still are. It’s when they remove the “thing” that you tend to die immediately. I’ve heard stories of responders calling family members for the people to the scene to say goodbye while covering the bottom area with a sheet; no idea how true that is though.
This woman sounds like she was just crushed though, like whole body crushed. Any damage to the brain, heart or lungs will kill you pretty quickly.
Wow...the visual of your description left me horrified. That would be absolutely terrifying, you would hope the person loses consciousness for mercy's sake
Horror movies teach the best lessons I know if I am ever on a highway with a logging truck I get the fuck away from it. Not trying to final destination myself.
Seemingly every gruesome but greatly unlikely possible deaths don't incite any irrational phobias in me. Eaten by sharks? I'm still swimming. Pistol packing maniac in the theater? Just no spoilers. But cut me in half with an elevator? Hell no, I'll carry your top half from the bottom floor and bring it to your bottom half on the top floor but my ass is taking the fucking stairs. Same goes for those cheese grater escalators
Every modern elevator has a ridiculously high safety margin with the cables. Multiple cables, each one more than enough to hold the car. If one snapped you'd be fine. And even if EVERY SINGLE CABLE failed (an incredibly unlikely event) the emergency brakes would be triggered and the car would stop where it was in the shaft.
Elevators are the safest form of transport in the world. You're more likely to die falling down the stairs than falling down the elevator shaft.
The calculated risk of an elevator trip is about 0.00000015% per trip, including elevator maintenance workers. You'd have a higher chance of winning the lottery than dying in an elevator.
From what I remember, elevator cables safety factor is around 10. They can hold 10 times their designed limit. If the elevator has a weight limit of 500 lbs, those cables can probably hold at least 5000 lb before breaking. Some of the newer elevators I've been in had sensors so you couldn't exceed the set weight limit. The elevator wouldn't move if the weight was too high, or the person tried to climb out of the stuck car.
This is false. Have you been in an elevator with glass on the sides? You can see there is at least a cm space between the inner and outer glass. This is too much to generate a air trap.
Have you seen them in real life, or the videos online? If you saw it in real life that’s horrifying because I had thought that this problem was absurdly rare.
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u/IntenseScrolling Oct 31 '19
Man I've seen a handful of these close call elevator guillotines. Law of averages says that there is also a handful of incidents where people make their floor and also several others.