What happens if a lift cable snaps?

A passenger lift is suspended from several steel ropes, each individually rated to hold the loaded car, so a single cable failure changes nothing. Independently of the ropes, a mechanical governor detects overspeed and drives safety gear that clamps onto the guide rails, stopping the car within a short distance. Beneath the shaft there are buffers as a final layer. The famous free-fall case is from 1945, when a B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building and Betty Lou Oliver fell around 75 floors in a car whose ropes had been severed — she survived, largely because coiled cable in the pit and compressed air in the shaft absorbed the impact. The widely repeated advice about jumping at the last moment does not help: you cannot time it, and a jump removes at most a few kilometres per hour from an impact speed far higher than that.

What changes the figure

• Multiple hoist ropes plus rail-gripping safety gear make free fall a design case rather than a hazard
• Being stuck between floors is the realistic failure mode, and it is not dangerous
• Lying flat or jumping does not meaningfully change an impact that is not going to happen

Compiled from published lift engineering practice and documented incidents; free-fall of a modern passenger lift is effectively unrecorded.

Physiology, not instruction. Every figure here is a population range under particular conditions, and individual variation is large — temperature, exertion, fitness and health move all of them substantially. Nothing on this page is medical advice.

Situations

• Can you survive a plane crash? Usually — across all US airline accidents studied, more than 95 per cent of occupants survived.
• How long do you have to escape a sinking car? Usually 30 seconds to a couple of minutes of floating — and the window is the way out, not the door.
• Can quicksand pull you under? No. Quicksand is roughly twice as dense as a human body, so you float — you sink to about waist depth and stop.
• How far from a nuclear blast do you have to be to survive? It scales with yield: for a one-megaton airburst, survival is unlikely within about 5 km and likely beyond about 10-12 km.
• How long can you survive in a hot car? Under an hour on a warm day for a child — the interior gains about 20 °C in the first ten minutes.
• How long does it take to drown? Under a minute to lose consciousness — and it is almost silent, which is why so many drownings happen in sight of others.
• What height can you survive falling from? Survival is common below about 6 metres and rare above 20 — but people have survived falls from thousands.
• How likely are you to survive a shark attack? Very likely — of roughly 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide each year, fewer than ten are fatal.
• What happens if you fall into lava? You would not sink — lava is about three times denser than a body — but you would not survive the heat either.
• What should you do if you are caught in a rip current? Rips pull you out, not under. Swim parallel to the beach until you are out of the flow, then come in.
• Could you survive inside a whale? You cannot be swallowed by almost any whale — their throats are too narrow — and a stomach offers no air.
• How long do you have to escape a burning house? Around three minutes from the alarm sounding in a modern furnished home.
• Can you survive a tsunami? Yes, by moving inland and uphill immediately — 30 centimetres of moving water can knock an adult off their feet.
• How long can you survive in a sealed container? Carbon dioxide becomes dangerous long before oxygen runs out — a few hours in a cubic metre of air.