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Hi all,

As everyone would know if ya hit water to hard you break,

anyway was at a pool the other day and the 10metre platform was shut to the general public, as some guy hit the water wrong off it and died lol

so if anyone plans on pulling low and thinking the speed they will hit the water at will be just like jumping off a 10metre platform then be carefull of your body position when you impact with the water.

the d00d who died suffered from some internal injuries, he went to hospital and died, not sure how long he was there for before death, all I know is he was over weight and landed on his stomach of back(confirmed)

I also heard (rumour) that he wasn't mentally all there and all the kids yelled "do a front flip" and he ended up doing a belly flop

I was quite suprised to learn ya can die from 10 metre's into water. I was standing inline waiting to jump next to a nurse who worked at the hospital in emergency care

You want to see the scars?

A low pull over water put me in the hospital for 2 months.

Hi Tom

I once read a little on your accident,
Your chute hardly inflated at all didn't it ?

your jump from what I read sounded more like you jumped from the ful 486 feet
did your canopy slow you down much ?

also do ya wanna give a little explanation of your accident on here for the people who don't know it like my self

He died jumping off 10 meters? How's that possible? I'v been jumping higher than that off rocks right in the sea and nothing happened (had really sore balls though).

I wish...

hi dexter,
I made a typo/braino, meant to type feet

do you land feet first?
or do you do belly flops ?

landing on your back at 1 metre is enough for me to feel the pain lol

I wanna see... what happened?
I'm actually interested... glad you're ok. I take it it was awhile ago?

Jen

Jen I don't know much about it
but I have a feeling it was around 2000 and he had 13 operations to fix him self up

Wow.
Like you said.. you always think water is so safe. I obviously know it can hurt ya.... I think that this is an interesting thread to help people understand that it's not as safe as it makes you 'feel'
Jen

Ok good point!

It doesn't take much height, just the wrong entry into the water.I had a realtive die from about the same height. He was trying to do flips and landed on his side. It broke his neck and he drowned. Imagine the fetal position that a lot of us sleep in(especiallybase704) Assume that positon when you enter the water and your head and neck might not be able to take it. Body postion is more relevant than height.

Mike

Jen.. wuTs up? how r u guys doing down there in tehas?

From a statistical analysis of Emergency Room visits, LD50 is 90 feet over water and 30 feet over concrete. This is an average for the population as a whole without consideration for how the person fell. LD50 means Life or Death at 50% odds.

the trouble all started when Dutch Gold was teaching Tom how to BASE jump. You see Dutchie has this new pilot chute paching method.....

w0w, I would have thought 90% would die from 30 feet onto concrete,
I don't think I'd want to survive that fall

"Life" includes quadriplegia, double femur fractures, critical brain injury, persistent vegetative state...

You get the idea.

yup hence the reason I said "I don't think I'd want to survive that fall"

You can see the full story of my accident, including nifty animated graphics of my colon exploding, here. I'm not sure when the next time it will air is, but they seem to re-run the whole series pretty reguarly.

Short description: I lost altitude awareness and pulled too low over water. I reached line stretch and was stood up, but had less than half of my (round) canopy inflated, meaning that the total deceleration effect was very limited. I ended up with a bunch of internal injuries, and a fairly serious set of spinal fractures. It took a lot of surgery to get me back together, and I'll never be completely back to where I was before the accident, in a physical sense.

If you're ever in Twin Falls, you can come by and I'll show you the video.

out of all the jumps I've done into water only one really hurt me.

I jumped off only about 7 metre's and hit the water and for some reason this time water shot up my ass hole
and its hurt like freaking $hit, I thought I was gunna die, I was in agony,
then after about 5 minutes, I was 100% back to normal and never felt like I had even hurt my ass at all lol

tom would this be kinda what happend to your colon?

Yep. I know a couple of people who've had the same kind of experiences to a lesser degree. Several jumpers have hit hard and ended up with high speed enemas.

I think Tom made the mistake of trying to outdo that little blond Aussie. He has learnt a lot since then.

I did a low pull comp with him years ago (into water) and was very proud to walk away with my silver medal!!!!

We did a series of jumps where we went lower and lower until we reached our limit.

Each time, DW would do the exit count, and then leave a fraction of a second later so he could watch my p/c toss. Then he would pitch his p/c after me to claim the "victory". On the final jump, I smacked in with my slider arriving on impact and my body half way through the swing through. I was bruised up but I happy with my win. But when I stuck my head out of the water I heard a sordid moan from the distance. DW was lying in pain in the water with a mild case of concussion. The cheeky bugger had beaten me again. Hence my silver medal.

Learnings:
- don't do low pull comps with people who have mischievous grins and a habit of exiting just after you. Keep away from evil people and people with death wishes. Anyone who want to teach you surfing at a place called Dead Man's Reef is probably not a good opponent either. They probably have ulterior motives - their entertainment at your expense may be one of them!!!
- swing through is not the greatest time to impact the water. Time your opening.
- I recommend not doing it in the first place. But if you must:
- use a bigger p/c to get maximum drag asap. Who cares if you get centre cell stripping or weird pressurisations.
- make sure your deployment system is dry. Wet p/c get sticky and don't work as realiably and consistantly as dry ones. Consistancy is the key equipment factor. You need to have a system that is reliable and repeatable, otherwise you are playing Russian Roulette with mother earth.
- there is lots of turbulence around waterfalls. The greater the volume and denser the water, the greater the displacement of air particles, etc.
- broken water is better than still/flat water. Surface tension adds to the "hardness" of the water.
- etc.

Gotta go.

Ren-Hey, we're doing great down here... enjoying the warm weather. Up to the usual business of course. How are you?



Ugh... yeah, I had a similar experience from a water-skiing fall. Ouch!!!

Oh and Tom, I'll have to see the vid from you someday, somewhere... I don't have cable tv
Glad ya made it through it though, of course

Let me add:

Use a slider up square in preference to a round. A slider up square begins decelerating you as soon as it reaches line stretch, and slows you while the slider descends. A round requires full pressurization prior to slowing you. If you impact immediately after a slider up square is at line stretch, odds are you will walk away a hero. Impact immediately after a round reaches line stretch, and you'll be carried away.

The time it takes for the slider to descend is your "safety margin." If you hit with the slider 3/4 of the way down, everyone will still think you are really cool.

I remember DJ & I doing a 2-way and we kind of got into a low-puller-ego thing once in Freefall.
Dwain was on the boat watching and in transit to pick us up both up on the water jumps. Don started to go towards me instead of DJ because I was the closest to the boat.
Dwain jumped up, he was seriously Furious and he started Screaming Angrily . " Noooooo Stop ! "
"Don't you Dare pick-up The Dirty High Puller First !"
So, I was picked up last ........... fun times
.
edit to add:
tvpb:
...." people who have mischievous grins "
.
Ohhhh that reminds me also. That SMIRK, that little fucker had. It was WAY more than Mischievous or evil and one of a kind..
I will never forget. I had a (impact) one night. So I came crawling and limping in to the hotel some hours latter. He was standing right there like he had been patiently waiting there the whole time after he got the word that I got smacked-up.
I saw him just standing & looking at me and he was just grinning. So I snapped, "What the fuck you looking at ?" He didn't say anything. He just stood there with that Grinch, Smirk on his face and never answered.
.

Pffff, what a bunch of pussies...

Real men jump a square slider down and time their opening such that the hard opening of the no-slider is perfectly cancelled out by the smack into the water, resulting in a smooth and soft landing.

The window in which this works is very small though, so I recommend using a particular type of ZP for your pilotchutes to ensure success.

Ya, that be it.
.

Reminds me of the first friend I lost due to jumping, I was about 8-9 years old and me and some friends was bridgejumping, have some problems with dark black moving water ever sense ...

On the other hand, I have seen Tom's scars ... scary!

a conversation with Tom

Me: Why is I'm carrying the beer, I have broken my back
Tom: Me too
Me: I broken it twice
Tom: Me too
Silence
Me: I been dead once
Tom: Me too
Me: Well how old are you?
Tom: 33
Me: Sh*t!
Tom: That's why you carry the beer ...
Me: Ok

Funny stuff ...

PerFlare
Team Bautasten

and how old are you perflarE ?

I grew up jumping off a 10m platform at my local lake, thought I was pretty aware of risk factors. Progressed to cliff diving during a summer in Greece up to about 15m, hurt the odd time if you got it wrong but nothing serious.

Then a few years ago after a scuba dive I took all my scuba gear off other than my wetsuit and hoodie, figured I could do whatever I liked off a pier about 3m high because of all the protection. Did a somersault into a dive but didn't quite make the dive, hit the water face first (only unprotected part of my body). Holy shit water is hard at that speed. Anyway sitting in the pub downing Guiness a few hours later the guys couldn't stop laughing at the big red puffy swollen face I was sporting. I also had a very sore neck for a few days.

I reckon I was very close to doing some serious damage if the pier was a meter higher. Hate to think what a somersault gone wrong off a 10m platform would be like.

All the same, it was almost worth it for the scene of exploding laughter from the pier on hearing the slap of my face off the Atlantic ;-)

be sure to close ya eyes,
I did a front flip off a 1m spring board, eyes half open water smashed in lol.
so now always clothes my eyes for impact

I am a couple of years younger then Tom

It's easyier than most people think...I dived as a kid and threw highschool...if you dont know how to recover ...you can seriously get hurt. I also wakeboard and people get knocked out and drown....i have seen stars and been sore from falls that you would not suspect would be so bad. There is a way to recover a bad high dive by going into a pike position...with your feet and hands entering the water first and you break the water to lessen the force. But make sure your head is tucked down between your arms or you will have a permanent smile for a week or so....

From a statistical analysis of Emergency Room visits, LD50 is 90 feet over water and 30 feet over concrete. This is an average for the population as a whole without consideration for how the person fell. LD50 means Life or Death at 50% odds.

I used to do springboard diving when I was younger, and I quickly learned that an excellent idea when trying new things is to wear a pair of my soccer warmup pants and a hooded sweatshirt

Geez, I wonder how close I was to serious injury.

Back in high school me and my friends used to jump feet first off of a 35 ft bridge. It was fairly painless if you hit right. Everybody wanted to do the larger 75 ft bridge but nobody had the balls. I promised my friend if he went first and yelled back up that he was ok, I'd follow. I hit perfectly feet first, but two things hurt bad for about 5 minutes - the soles of my feet (I never pointed my toes) and I also got the "enema" pain you refer to. Another friend followed me, and while I was still reeling in pain from the experience, he entered the water, and broke the surface 10 seconds later screaming "THE WATER RAPED ME!"

I was a geek (heh, "was") and had just taken my first physics class so I calculated that we were going roughly 33mph off the small bridge, and 45mph off the large bridge, on impact. The impact felt significantly harder at only 12mph greater (kinetic energy and all). I can imagine 80mph would be near deadly.

For clarification Tom, how did you get scars? From the surgery for your spine?

I've seen it both ways. Life or Death was quoted to me by an ER physician (who actually graduated first in his medical school!) who came out on my first BASE jump at a BASE boogie.

My understanding from people who've hit the water successfully at high speed have (including the military doing drops from helicoptors):
bring feet and knees together, point toes (some do, some do not), bring arms in (to prevent breaking them, the torque is on the elbows), pull head back slightly to prevent water surge under eyelids and subsequent eye damage.

Wait Per, didn't you each decide to carry one? That was one of the funniest conversations I've ever heard.

I also liked your story about why car crashes are "very nice" oh man...

This surprising nonlinearity is similar to that of slider down openings: the hardness of the opening is not proportional to delay (where delay = time from jump to line stretch), but to the cube of it.

Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of speed, and the amount of time it takes to dissipate that energy is reversely proportional to speed (as the characteristic time it takes to displace water/air masses is equal to characteristic length -- of your body for water jumps or of the parachute for BASE -- divided by speed). The damage to your body is determined by the rate of dissipation of energy. So, for 4s delay (pull at 3s, plus ~1s for line stretch) the opening is approx. 8 times harder than for 2s delay (pull at 0.5s + 1.5s for line stretch).

When we deal with something we have never experienced before, our intuition tends to extrapolate prior experiences linearly, while it may be in fact highly nonlinear (another example of this - discussion of the safe height to clear platform on antenna not long ago). Elementary physics oftentimes can save an ouch or two.

Yuri

its hard to be older than Tom,Ray L. Nick DG etc etc

It never ceases to amaze me...

Every time I have a BASE video playing in the background when I have friends over, someone comments that "I'd do that" when they see people jumping the bridge in Twin Falls over water. Their justification is always that you couldn't possibly die.

To make their beliefs even more idiotic, most of them have witnessed first hand what water can do when seeing me get injured bailing off wakeboards, kneeboards, skis, and waverunners at high speed

The scars were mostly from the surgery for my intestines.

The spine surgery wasn't done in a "must go now to save his life" kind of way, so the scars are pretty small.

However, when I hit the water, my colon pretty much exploded, filling my abdominal cavity with both fecal matter (my own) and relatively unsanitary river water (forced in at high speed). The danger of infection from these was extremely high. I was on antibiotics for quite a long time, and was suffering from high fever due to that infection for more than 2 weeks. I was also bleeding to death from the tears.

This meant that the intestinal surgery, both to stop the bleeding and to clean the contaminants out of my abdominal cavity, was done in a "must go now to save his life" kind of way. The surgeons (who were excellent, and who deserve full credit for saving my life) were more concerned with stopping the bleeding and cleaning up than they were with making pretty incisions. As a result, they left me with some fairly noticeable scars, which I think is a pretty fair trade for saving my life.

If you're ever in need of emergency trauma surgery in Idaho, I recommend Drs. Robert Korn and Elizabeth Livingston. If you need Spine Surgery, I recommend Dr. Paul Monalbano, who is pretty much responsible for my continued ability to walk.

some people also think the cant drown if they wear a life west...
they can if they dont wear it probaly

some people think its ok to dry their pets in a micro oven,the pets usaly dont like that...

Chad!

Hope you are having fun over there. Looking forward to hook up again in the future! Give my best to Katie.

Have the best of times and stay alive!

PerFlare

I will correct your English if you don't mind: its hard to be fatter than Tom.

bsbd!

Yuri.

Hmmm...I think he's pretty damn hot

Sonofabitch I lay-off giving you shit for a couple weeks punk. Look what happens. You think I am your whipping boy for comment.
.

I've been told "chicks dig scars."
coincidence?

(oh, good work on that whole delivery thing!)

Even as a physicist, I am confused about what you are saying.

quoted by Tom:
I was also bleeding to death from the tears.


Tom, were you crying blood?

Tears: rips in my flesh.

Tear, to tear, torn.

That kind of tears. Multiple rips in my flesh.

Tom,

How did you fix your colon ?
did you get a new 1 or some artificial replacement ?
or did they some how manage to stick it back together ?

They removed a little (not much) of it. The rest healed naturally. There was a period of several months in the interim, in which I had a colostomy (if you're not sure what that is, just trust me that it ain't pretty) to allow the healing to take place.

Who's that girl in that photo?

And who's heart is he driving that stake into?

There was actually a dead animal on the ground, just there. Go figure.

No i know..

You just make sure you let me give you your next Pin Check before you exit......
.

your welcome mate but last few times we jumped you jumped before me as if you were scared standing up there ´whith me.. dont trust in Chad n Katie that i smell like a dead up there...its more like roses

I think what he meant was that:
Velocity goes linearly with delay
Air resistance and kinetic energy go as square of delay
Power goes as cube of delay

I do not think this is entirely correct here.

If the canopy opening takes same time at all airspeeds, then power ("spank") is roughly proportional to the square of delay. But if they open faster, the faster you go, then the depency will be more than square.
Opening time would have to behave like inverse of delay to get the cube dependency of power. Quite non-linear anyway.

(From a former computational chemist/physicist, so take it as pure speculation and with grain of salt)

Don't be lazy and come with Navier-Stokes based ab-inito model. :-)

Former ab initio Navier Stokes whatever...

I fully agree, as former general relativity and nonlinear dynamic physicist. Unfortunately you cannot really live for 150 EUR a month, that why banks are full physicists (in Czech republic). Anyway, my college was only 50 meters high. The same day the will get 90 meters building I'm back :-)

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From a statistical analysis of Emergency Room visits, LD50 is 90 feet over water and 30 feet over concrete. This is an average for the population as a whole without consideration for how the person fell. LD50 means Life or Death at 50% odds. <"

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On 23 Oct 2005 I fell 30 feet, accoding to the paramedics and people who were with me, from girders on a certain bridge frequently jumped in CA. I landed on hard packed dirt and rocks, which was pretty much like pavement. I had lots of injuries, was in ICU fnr 11 days, but amazingly did not break any long bones or suffer any permanent damage except for partial T 12 and L 1 compression fractures.

The recovery has been hard, though, and I never knew how much pain a person could have until that accident.

I was also told by the trauma docs about the 50% overall lethality of such a fall.

I am really lucky to be alive, and it proves it is better to be lucky than smart.

Don't downclimb those stinking girders, if at all possible.

That fall, unfortunately, put an end to my BASE jumping, mostly but not totally due to all the grief it caused my loved ones, who went through hell.

I was curious what your injuries were. Thanks for posting that.