Man survives 170ft plunge over Niagara

In the footage, he can be seen approaching Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian
side. Without pausing to speak to anyone, he vaults a short fence and jumps
about 30ft into the water below.

Almost instantly, he is swept over the edge of the falls. But after hitting
the bottom he emerges, minus his shirt, before clinging to a rock and
waiting for the emergency services to arrive. He surfaced in the lower
Niagara River basin near the Journey Behind the Falls observation platform.
CCTV shows officers talking to him before he was airlifted to hospital with
broken ribs and cuts to the head.

The incident unfolded in front of hundreds of tourists lining the street above
the falls and on the Maid of the Mist boat tour, which takes passengers
close to the bottom of the falls.

Dan Orescanin, of the Niagara Falls Fire Department, said: “He was very lucky.
He just happened to come down the river into an eddy [a place devoid of
downstream current] and that enabled him to get out. If he had been in the
main current, he wouldn’t have survived. By the time we got to him, he was
hypothermic. He was shaking like a leaf.”

Sgt Chris Gallagher, of the Niagara Parks Police, told The Daily Telegraph
that officers had interviewed the man in hospital and, as a result, had
classified the case as an attempted suicide. He refused to discuss the man’s
motive, saying only that he had “serious issues”.

The fact that he fell from the side of the falls, rather than down the middle,
was thought to have contributed to his survival. Sgt Gallagher said that the
slower current, combined with a smaller number of rocks, would have helped.

“I don’t think there is a better place to go over the falls,” he added. “God
was probably on his side and looking down on him when he went.”

In 1901, Annie Edison Taylor became the first person to go over the falls and
live. She did so inside a barrel and 17 others have replicated the feat. In
1960, a seven-year-old boy named Roger Woodward went over the falls after
his boat capsized. He was wearing a life jacket and was pulled from the
water by passengers on the Maid of the Mist boat.

The first person to survive without a safety device was Kirk Jones in 2003. He
was charged with performing an illegal stunt and later joined a circus in
Texas as the “world’s greatest stuntman”.

The only other comparable incident was in 2009, when an unidentified man
survived a suicide attempt.

Paul Gromosiak, a Niagara historian, said there were one or two suicide bids a
week at the falls, including those who were rescued in the water above the
drop. “There are odds that you will survive, but they’re so minuscule that
it’s impossible to comprehend,” he added.

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