A Bad Day At Work

This is not a story for cleithrophobes. If you think you are having a bad day at work, give a thought to Betty Lou Oliver, a lift attendant in the Empire State Building. On July 28, 1945 the twenty-year-old was on duty when at 9.40am a US Air Force B25-Mitchell bomber piloted by Lt Col William Smith flew straight into the building in poor visibility, killing three on board and eleven in the building.

Thrown from the lift that she was operating at the time of the impact, Betty suffered severe burns and broke several bones. Mercifully, she survived but that was not the end of her ordeal by any stretch of the imagination. After being bandaged up, she was stretchered into another lift, when, lo and behold, the extra weight caused its cables, already weakened by the crash, to snap.

Conscious and screaming, Betty plunged down seventy-five floors to the bottom, but, remarkably, she even survived that. A combination of the airtight shaft and the cables which had previously supported the lift piling up underneath it cushioned her fall.

Remarkably, she lived to survive the tale, earning herself a mention in Guinness World Records as the survivor of the longest lift fall, and lived to the ripe old age of seventy-four. She only visited the building once more, five months later, travelling in the same lift in which she made her unprecedented descent.