Tourist survives 100-foot bungee cord snap in Thailand
A Hong Kong man claims he was injured after his bungee cord snapped during a nearly 100-foot drop over water in Thailand.
The tourist, identified only as Mike, told CNN he closed his eyes during the plunge and expected to be hanging upside down over a small lake when he opened them. Instead, he was in the water below.
Video of the incident, which reportedly happened in January at the Changthai Thappraya Safari and Adventure Park in Pattaya, recently went viral.
“I landed on my left side so the injuries were more serious there,” Mike told CNN. “It was as if someone just beat me up real bad.”
Mike’s injuries included bruising and a lung infection, he told the Strait Times. He complained about the incident in an email to the park and Thailand’s tourism authority, according to the outlet.
“My friends and I suffered losses due to the accident, including changes to our travel plans, my injuries and income loss... If the accident had been more severe, I could have lost my life,” Mike wrote.
The park’s founder, Nithit Intim, told CNN that Mike signed a waiver before the jump, and that the park paid for him to go to the hospital.
A bungee jump operator at the park, meanwhile, told the Straits Times the company had previously offered bungee cord drops for seven years without incident.
“All of our equipment is licensed,” Natthaphon Yokcharoen claimed. “I would like to apologize for this incident.”
Video seems to show Mike’s chord slowing his descent before giving way toward the end of his plummet. That was also the case in a 2012 bungee cord mishap in southern Africa, where a 22-year-old Australian woman survived a broken chord at the end of a 365-foot drop.
“It seemed as if I slowed down for a second, then sped up,” Erin Langworth said in a first-person story published by the Guardian. “Then I felt myself hit the water — that’s when I realised (sic) something had gone wrong.”
Health Research Funding reports the odds of a bungee jumping accident are 500,000 to 1, with human error being the top reason for deaths.
