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Why Do Tower Strikes Continue To Happen Every Year Off The Massively Overhanging KL Tower?

By Gary Cunningham

This image depicts where it started to go wrong at all levels. The complacency of BASE jumpers. The negligence of event contractors. The strong denial of later KL Tower management. All parties were very naively or negligently keen to ensure tower strikes continued to happen.
This image depicts where it started to go wrong at all levels. The complacency of BASE jumpers. The negligence of event contractors. The strong denial of later KL Tower management. All parties were very naively or negligently keen to ensure tower strikes continued to happen.

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KL Tower is such an overhanging object that it should be impossible to hit, right?

Well, that is what we all thought when we attended the first major KL Tower international BASE jumping event back in 2001. However, it did not take very long for this theory to be proven wrong with an experienced BASE jumper slamming into KL Tower during the one-day event. At the time we all wondered how it was possible to hit such an overhanging object. Most BASE jumpers soon dismissed it as a rare one-off incident that was unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

But as BASE jumping events continued to take place at KL Tower each year, so did the tower strikes. Every year up to 3 BASE jumpers would crash into KL Tower. While some people have bounced off it ending up just a little bit battered and bruised, others have sustained horrific injuries. This includes people receiving multiple broken bones, being knocked unconscious, losing teeth, and other head and bodily trauma. One person had a heavy loss of blood from where his bones were sticking out of his leg after a significantly delayed rescue. Tower strikes are not only a terrible thing for the injured BASE jumpers, they are a bad image for the event and for KL Tower.

I think most BASE jumpers would agree that there is something very wrong if over a period of 20 years of hosting events at KL Tower, there has only been one year where zero tower strikes have been achieved. It was always highly embarrassing at every event that we could not even prevent a basic thing like tower strikes at such a massively overhanging tower, which should have been very easy to prevent.

It was a very long learning curve to realise the wide range of reasons that led BASE jumpers to keep crashing into such an overhanging tower that should be almost impossible to hit. The biggest lessons learnt were how naively determined everyone from KL Tower managers, event safety contractors, and BASE jumpers were to ensure tower strikes continue to happen every year. I am not suggesting that anyone actually wanted BASE jumpers to slam into KL Tower potentially getting seriously injured or killed. However, they all certainly wanted to continue to do everything that was known to guarantee that tower strikes would happen every year.

Full Article coming soon....

Other Articles In The Tower Strike Series

KL Tower BASE Jump. Trying to educate BASE jumpers how to prevent tower strikes
Despite education given to BASE jumpers about the serious problem of tower strikes and the frequency that they happen, BASE jumper’s core belief and feeling that it should be almost impossible to hit such a massively overhanging tower remained dominant. The basic standard safety precautions everyone was asked to take to ensure there were no tower strikes at this high-profile BASE jumping event continued to be looked upon by many as overly cautious and totally unnecessary. But every year one or more BASE jumpers would find out the hard way how easy it was to hit KL Tower when they failed to take the standard safety precautions.
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KL Tower BASE Jump. Consequences of eliminating tower strikes. Gary Cunningham, Aziz Ahmad, KL Tower Head Of Events Mohd Dzulfiqhary Ibrahim, Avery Badenhop,Azuan Taharudin and Haziq Azlan
After 17 years we finally eliminated tower strikes from the event. It was a matter of neutralising the negligence of new KL Tower managers and event contractors, and then applying the knowledge we had acquired over the history of the event. It was a great achievement to finally put in place what would prevent many serious injuries. It should have been the first of many improvements to step up event safety to at least a minimum expected level. However, this left new KL Tower managers and rogue event contractors very furious. They resorted to going down the same dark path as previous KL tower managers did 10 years prior, doing everything known that would bring back a record number of tower strikes and set Malaysian BASE jumping events up for another fatality.
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