She fell 75 floors in an elevator and lived 54 more years

Betty Lou Oliver was twenty years old and ran an elevator at the Empire State Building. On Saturday 28 July 1945 she fell seventy-five floors in one of them, down to the sub-basement, and came out alive. She lived fifty-four more years.

At 9:40 that morning a B-25 bomber heading for Newark lost itself in the fog and struck the north face of the building at the 79th floor. Fourteen people died: the three crew members and eleven employees who had come in to work on a Saturday. Oliver was found burned on the 80th floor and put into another car to be taken down to the street. The plane had cut the cables of that car too, and nobody knew it.

Two things saved her, both of them textbook. The severed cables had coiled in the pit of the shaft and formed a steel cushion several metres deep. And the air in that shaft, compressed by the car falling like a piston in a tube, slowed it over the last floors. She reached the bottom conscious, with a broken pelvis, back and neck, and firefighters had to cut the car open with axes to get her out.

Guinness still lists those seventy-five floors as the longest elevator fall anyone has survived, and in eighty years nobody has come close: a shaft with loose cables at the bottom and no venting is not built any more. The Empire State reopened its offices on Monday.