Falling information

I read this morning that the seventh is the most dangerous building floor for a cat to fall from. The article said that more cats live through a fall from eighth, ninth and tenth stories than from number seven. Personally, I doubt it; however there are incidents of cats falling great distances and surviving.

Several years ago I wrote of a report in a vet magazine telling of 132 cats that had fallen anywhere from 32 to two stories being studied. All but three of them survived, often with no serious injury at all. The one that fell 32 stories had a bruised chest and a chipped tooth. The average fall was 5 1/2 stories.

When our first baby got big enough to start climbing around a little, Iris worried that he might fall out of his crib at night and we wouldn't hear himŠso I offered to raise the crib a foot or two.

A strongly held belief up until a few years ago was that someone actually falling from a very high place would die before they hit. My personal record for falling through space is only a couple of miles. Since that time 50 years ago thousands have now done much more. A world record was set by Captain Joe Kittinger who jumped from a balloon at 102,800 feet over Tularosa, New Mexico in 1960. He fell a little over 16 miles before opening his parachute. An Australian was going to try and beat that but I never heard of him pulling it off.

The farthest I've seen someone fall around here was from Mike Strand's Cessna above Glacier International about 20 years ago, 32,000 feet. I was supposed to find the Thompson Falls guy but he landed across the river and some logger drove him to the Blue Moon when I wasn't looking. He had a frozen spot on his eyeball.

I reckon a free falling human hits terminal velocity after about 2,000 feet in normal (livable) atmospheric pressure, around 120 miles per hour. A falling person can pick up about 60 mph by assuming a head down position.

Up in the stratosphere, falling is dangerous because of the lack of oxygen and the intense cold, so experiments carried on there have to include specialized equipment.

As for falling-speed way up there in thin air country, I recall getting pretty excited in 1952 when an Air force parachute tester hit 238 miles per hour at around 35,000 feet but Captain Killinger broke that all to heck on his record distance fall. He found a terminal velocity of 614 miles per hour in the rarefied atmosphere 19 miles up. That is probably still the world's speed record for a human body being propelled by nothing but gravity.

Besides cats, another animal that has tremendous shock absorbing power in its legs is the bighorn sheep. Hal Kanzler and I once watched a young ram shoved backward by a bigger ram off a cliff on Mt. Henkel. He fell about 60 feet and before making contact with a rock ledge, which he hit on all four feet and just sort of bounced nonchalantly on down the cliff another 100 feet before heading back up for another go. I have since seen them deliberately leaping down frightening places.

So what animal holds the record for surviving the longest fall without a parachute? It is man of course, the Russian, I.M. Chisov, who fell 21,980 feet from a badly damaged airplane in 1942. He hit in the deep snow at a glancing angle on the edge of a ravine and slid to the bottom, suffering a fractured pelvis and severe spinal injuries. Remember, he was probably falling at well over 200 miles per hour shortly after leaving the plane but was slowing down as he came closer to earth.

If he was spread eagled at all, he could have been going less than a hundred miles per hour when he struck the ground and undoubtedly hit flat, so the shock was distributed throughout his body. He might have been wearing a light fall suit.

I recall the never tried 1970's plan of Evil Knievel to jump from a plane and belly flop into a haystack.

Down at college I was loving a girl in a hammockŠbut we had a falling out.

G. George Ostrom is the news director at KOFI radio and a Hungry Horse News columnist.