Howard Chapman, Buildingtalk Editor reports on 400 years of base jumps from some of the world’s tallest structures.
I was in London at the weekend when a base jumper parachuted from the European Union’s tallest building, The Shard in London, an 87-storey building at London Bridge that stands at 1,016ft (310m).
He landed in St Thomas’s Street near Borough Market just after 10am. With a little help from his friends he evaded police by fleeing via the Underground.
Nobody has been arrested but a spokesperson for The Shard said: “We are investigating an incident involving a member of the public this morning.”
The event was caught on camera by Justin Knock (see top photo above) and here are links to 3 videos of the event:
This is just the latest in a long line of incident of people jumping from the worlds tallest structures.
Here are some notable jumps, beginning 400 years ago with the first, inspired by Leonardo de Vinci’s parachute design.
And finally, as a warning to ‘don’t try this at home’, BASE jumping as of 2006 has an over-all fatality rate estimated at about one fatality per sixty participants. As of 10 September 2014, the ‘BASE Fatality List’ maintained by Blincmagazine.com records 256 deaths for BASE jumping since April 1981.
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