WEIRD NEWS: Woman Survives Six Story Fall into Pile of Human Waste

A woman in Nanjing, a city in the Jiangsu province of China, survived a six story fall on Wednesday after her landing was cushioned by a pile of human excrement. The heap of waste that cushioned her fall was estimated to be approximately 20 centimeters, or 7.9 inches, in depth.

The woman, who news sources in China did not name, fell after accidentally slipping off the edge of an outdoor balcony at her home in a sixth floor apartment. According to a report from the China News Service, the fall occurred when the woman was stretching to hang her laundry on a clothesline. She lost her balance and went over the edge of the balcony, tumbling rapidly towards the street.

Meanwhile, maintenance workers six stories below were excavating the storage tanks in the building's septic system. A pile of waste that workers had cleared from the tanks broke the woman's landing when she reached the ground.

According to an official state media source located in the southern city of Nanjing, the workers had been called in to clear the tank's contents after complaints were made by area residents. The article about the incident in the local Kuaibao newspaper suggested that the building's occupants had demanded the septic tanks be emptied after the lack of septic tank maintenance began to affect daily life in the building. Occupants reported experiencing frequent blocks in the building's pipes, blocks that were probably due in large part to the overloaded septic tanks.

The woman walked away from her ordeal without serious physical damage, and suffered only minor cuts, scrapes, and bruising. She has remained as anonymous as possible to the public sphere, declining to comment to reporters or media outlets, and has no known plans to release a public statement about her experience.

Experts and past precedents confirm that, if not for the mass of fortuitously placed septic tank contents, the fall could easily have proved fatal.

Survival in a fall of this magnitude can occasionally occur, depending largely on the conditions of the landing. This past March, a child in the northeastern Heilongjiang region of China fell six stories onto a pile of snow and survived with only a broken leg. Scientific studies on impact and trauma suggest that it is nearly impossible to survive a free fall of more than six stories. There are several documented cases of people surviving six story falls, but cases of free fall survival without lasting damage are unusual, and highly dangerous to attempt to replicate.

Sources:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/04/03/1175366243862.html?from=top5t=&
http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2007/04/04/poo_pile_saves.php
http://passablynews.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1175967196&archive=&start_from=&ucahttp://www.cns.com.cn/sh/news/2007/04-03/906532.shtml
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1259120,00.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7299869&dopt=Abstract