Do nets on tall buildings catch falling bodies?

October 24, 2008 7:20 AM

Is it true that there are wire nets on the Empire State Building (or any other tall building) that will catch a heavy object (like a human body) if it falls (or jumps)?

I remember my high school physics teacher telling us about these nets when we were calculating how long it would take a penny to hit the ground if dropped from the observation deck. Naturally we wanted to know what would happen to a person who fell from that height.

He told us the nets would act as a sieve and actually cut human flesh into cubes so no one on the ground would be hit by an entire body.

This just seems ridiculous to me...does anyone know anything about this?

posted by junipero to Grab Bag (14 answers total)

This recent LA Times article (found via this search) suggests they did/do exist.

"...the effectiveness of barriers has been 'dramatic' at such landmarks as the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower."
posted by nitsuj at 7:29 AM on October 24, 2008

I've seen bridges with nets, but I've never seen a tall building with a net. Often times windows are sealed after 2-3 stories and any sort of observation deck has those curved fences that will, if not prevent, slow a suicide attempt until the rent-a-cops arrive. I think the window sealing is to prevent smokers from catching a quick break and then tumbling out, more than actual suicide, but the suicide ability in skyscrapers is really minimal.
posted by geoff. at 7:29 AM on October 24, 2008

It's been a while since I was there but I seem to recall the nets weren't too far below the observation deck and there were a lot of paper cups and other crap caught in them. I don't think they'd cut a human so much as catch them and make them feel foolish.
posted by bondcliff at 7:32 AM on October 24, 2008

The nets aren't designed to cube and dice, but there are other things you can hit on the way down. Slightly grisly story from last year here.
posted by mandal at 7:43 AM on October 24, 2008

The Notre Dame has nets. Apparently suicides were pretty common there (see the beginning of Amelie.)
posted by hydrophonic at 7:45 AM on October 24, 2008

Notre Dame has a caged enclosure, as does the top of the Eiffel Tower. I think both are different to what the OP has in mind.

I don't think the Eiffel Tower has any nets. The top is a cage, the second floor is open but suicide would require jumping beyond the width of the first floor, and I don't think the first floor has nets - it is also enclosed. People do jump from it though.
posted by fire&wings at 7:53 AM on October 24, 2008

Couldn't you just jump off the net?
posted by kirkaracha at 8:05 AM on October 24, 2008

Here's some pictures looking down from the Empire State. No nets, but there's a couple of setbacks just below the observation deck that you'd have to clear.

Here's a big zoom from the ground.
posted by steef at 8:06 AM on October 24, 2008

He told us the nets would act as a sieve and actually cut human flesh into cubes so no one on the ground would be hit by an entire body.

I dunno about you, but my flesh is strapped to these hard calcified sticks that are apparently pretty hard to slice.
posted by mendel at 12:38 PM on October 24, 2008

Space Needle in Seattle installed has 'safety' nets after a rash of jumpers. Later they added 'protective' cables around the observation deck to further impede suicides after one woman crawled out of the net to continue her jump.
posted by trinity8-director at 1:47 PM on October 24, 2008

Your teacher told you that, about the slicing? With a straight face? Whatta maroon.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 2:18 PM on October 24, 2008

An aquaintance of mine at a large hotel with a cavernous internal atrium on Times square showed me photos he personally took of the large pieces of human flesh that resulted from an interior jump and a subsequent collision with the expose elevators in the atrium. He called them 'meat'. (He was, incidentally, their security manager and I was engineering his room lock system.) Pretty icky. Ick.

Bodies are just bags of water with sticks in them. They are not very strong. How a naked body would react versus one garbed in Levi's is speculation.

I have no idea what a chain link net would do to a body at the terminal velocity of 120 MPH or so, but I suspect a fair amount of shredding would take place. At the very least, a hefty showering of body fluids would likely make it through. I also suspect that a net of any sort at low floors on such a structure would have to have incredible tensile strength and some serious, serious, serious support structures. It would be rather ugly as well. (Archiitects just LOVE that sort of thing on their precise facades!)

Physics is physics. It has no special respect for human parts. Shoot a corpse at an obstacle at a high enough speed and it will dissociate catastrophically.
posted by FauxScot at 6:00 PM on October 24, 2008

I used to work in the Empire State Building, near the top. There's a series of barriers that keep anyone who leaps from the building from reaching the ground. First, the architecture of the building itself; The top of the building is inset a few times towards the top. Those outcroppings are about 6 to 8 feet wide each, meaning you'd have to get 20 feet or more away from the building just to avoid hitting them.

On the primary observation deck, there's a very high fence that curves inward at the top. That makes it pretty tough to climb over it and make a leap. In addition there are, yes, nets above the final (lowest) outcropping, though they don't look like giant fishing nets and are in fact pretty subtle, so they just keep a theoretical flying body close to the building. They don't turn it into little cubes of flesh.

This entire elaborate system got a test while I was working in the building, though I was south-facing and the man who killed himself jumped from the north side. Apparently, a fellow in a pirate suit (no, really!) had used the building itself to vault the observation deck fence and cleared at least the first outcropping before being stopped. I don't think he made it even halfway down the building.

Interestingly, it'd probably be a lot easier to leap from the ESB from almost any place but the observation deck. At least when I was working there, the windows were wide and opened completely and had no screens or barriers of any sort -- we could have thrown a refrigerator out of the windows, let alone ourselves. Still, you'd have to make some fantastic horizontal progress to clear all the barriers, and I don't think you could do that while also perfectly getting through the window frame, all while in a suicidal state of mind.

And yes, we threw lots of pennies (and all kinds of other assorted things like balsa wood gliders and frisbees and the like) from the 76th floor. Due to wind resistance and other factors, the items that we did get to clear all the outcroppings and make it all the way down to the sidewalk basically landed as if we'd thrown them out a third-story window. Fairly anticlimactic.
posted by anildash at 9:37 PM on October 24, 2008

If the nets are relatively close, falling bodies would get nowhere near terminal velocity.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:06 PM on January 15, 2009