The Empire State Building and the Longest Survived Elevator Fall

The tower rising ahead of you is the Empire State Building, and on a foggy morning in nineteen forty five, a bomber crashed straight into its upper floors, setting off one of the strangest survival stories in the city's history.

On July twenty eighth, nineteen forty five, a United States Army Air Forces B two five bomber was flying through thick fog over Manhattan, unable to land at the airport as scheduled, when it slammed into the building's north side between the seventy eighth and eightieth floors. The crash and the fire that followed killed fourteen people, three crew members and eleven people working inside the building, and injured roughly two dozen more. One engine tore loose and shot clean through the building, landing in the street below.

The crash's strangest chapter involves an elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver. She was working on the eightieth floor when the plane hit, and she was thrown from her car and badly burned. Rescuers decided to move her down in a different elevator, but the crash had already damaged that car's supporting cables, and as it started downward, they gave way completely. The car plunged more than seventy five stories, falling over a thousand feet into the building's basement. Remarkably, Oliver survived. Investigators later concluded that air trapped in the shaft beneath the falling car acted like a cushion, slowing it just enough. She suffered a broken pelvis, back, and neck, but she lived, and her fall remains, according to Guinness World Records, the longest survived elevator fall on record.

The building reopened for business the next day. Climbing past the seventy ninth floor on a clear afternoon gives no hint of the scar it once carried, but on a foggy morning eighty years ago, this was the site of a crash that one elevator operator survived twice over.