Wisconsin man still alive after fall from 17th  floor  
The  Associated Press  
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A physicist calculated that a Wisconsin man was traveling  
about 69 mph when he hit a roof overhang after falling through a 17th-floor  
window in a downtown hotel. He remained in critical condition Tuesday, three  
days after the fall.

Joshua Hanson, 29, a bar owner from Blair, Wis., was  in town for a dart 
tournament. Police said he went out drinking Friday night in  St. Paul, then 
returned to the hotel about 1:30 a.m. Saturday.

When he  got off the elevator on the 17th floor, he ran down a hallway and 
fell into a  large window. The glass gave way and Hanson fell out and down about 
160 feet  onto an asphalt-covered overhang 160 feet below.

“At this point, we’re  regarding it as an accident,” said Lt. Amelia 
Huffman, a Minneapolis police  spokeswoman. “We haven’t received any information 
that would indicate it was  anything other than the result of tomfoolery and a 
little too much to  drink.”

Danny Austad, Hanson’s roommate back in Blair, said the prognosis  was good 
and that he might be out of the Hennepin County Medical Center next  week.

“He had surgery on his leg. They put a metal rod in his leg. But  basically, 
that’s it,” Austad said. “It doesn’t look like other major injuries.  He got 
lucky. No back, no spinal, no head injuries.”

A big reason for  Hanson’s survival was probably that he hit a roof overhang, 
which collapsed a  bit, rather than asphalt, said Jim Kakalios, a professor 
in the School of  Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

He estimated that  if Hanson fell about 160 feet — a hotel manager’s 
estimate — he was going about  69 miles when he hit and apparently broke through part 
of the  overhang.

Kakalios said the awning functioned like an automobile’s  airbag, slowing the 
deceleration time which is vital because it’s not the long  fall that kills, 
it’s the sudden stop at the end.

“Even a small change in  deceleration, if it goes from 1 millisecond to 3 
milliseconds, it’s a factor of  three. It’s the difference between a lethal 
force and a force that just knocks  you unconscious,” he said. “The awning acted 
as a de facto airbag. Even a slight  change in the increase in time can make a 
big difference.”

It might have  also helped that Hanson was drunk.

In 1963, Richard G. Snyder wrote one  of the major studies on long falls. In 
the paper, “Human Survivability of  Extreme Impacts in Free-Fall,” Snyder 
noted that falling victims who were  intoxicated had a “disproportionate survival 
rate” in such falls.

He  suggested that intoxicated people may be more relaxed when they fall, and 
 perhaps that made the muscles more tolerant of impact forces. He made the 
same  observation about suicidal paranoid schizophrenics. He qualified both  
observations by saying the matter needed more  study