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Good catch — 11 Comments

  1. What a heroine!

    A quick calculation indicates that (neglecting air resistance) the child would fall 10 stories (100′, or 30 m) in about 2.5 sec, and reach a speed of 25 m/sec – 55 mph!

    Hope Wu called for a fair catch!

  2. Occam- my driving instructor used the illustration of tossing a ten pound bag of sugar from the second story of a building to get the idea of the forces involved in holding on to an infant if you’re going 25mph in a car and hit the breaks. At two, the girl might be 25-35 pounds?

    If I remember right, it’s a good thing the lady was running– shifts the force of impact, instead of being a straight stop.

  3. This is on a par with falling on a grenade by a soldier. No thought of the consequences, only wanting to save life. It is a wonderful thing that we are capable of such love. That they both survived adds a touch of the miraculous to the story.

  4. I didn’t mention this above, but I estimated the child to weigh ca. 10 kg (22 lbs.), which, traveling at 25 m/sec (55 mph), gives her a momentum of 250 kg-m/sec. (Where the hell is physicsguy when you really need him?) So our heroine pretty much experienced something like tackling an NFL running back head on and stopping him dead in his tracks.

    And she probably doesn’t weigh 100 lbs. dripping wet.

  5. We need more stories like this. At least I know I need more stories like this.

  6. Looks like 2-year-old Niu Niu didn’t escape unscathed either, but being in the hospital with “internal injuries” is vastly preferable to being in the morgue, where she almost certainly would have been had she hit the pavement without having her fall broken.

  7. Nice. But unnecessary. Where were the kid’s parents?
    The responsible have to pick up for, and sometimes pay a price for the picking up, the irresponsible.
    Ranges from this mom to the sheepdog to picking up somebody else’s litter in a park.

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