Why Do Tower Strikes Continue To Happen Every Year Off The Massively Overhanging KL Tower?
By Gary Cunningham
The Tower Strike Series Preview.....
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.