On this day in New York · July 28, 1945
A Bomber Hits the Empire State Building
Lost in thick fog over Manhattan, an Army B-25 flew straight into the 79th floor of the world's tallest building, and a young elevator operator survived a fall no one should have.
The facts
- Date
- July 28, 1945
- Site
- The north face of the Empire State Building, near the 79th floor
- Toll
- 14 killed, three crew and eleven people in the building
- Survivor
- Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver, who lived through a plunge of dozens of floors
On the foggy morning of July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber of the Army Air Forces, off course over Midtown, slammed into the north face of the Empire State Building between the 78th and 80th floors. The crash tore an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole in the tower, sent burning fuel down elevator shafts, and killed fourteen people, three crew members and eleven workers inside. Betty Lou Oliver, an elevator operator, was thrown from her car with severe burns, then plunged dozens of floors when the cables snapped and lived to tell it. The skyscraper reopened for business two days later.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The crash killed fourteen people (three crewmen and eleven people in the building)
1945 Empire State Building B-25 crash, Wikipedia
Source: 1945 Empire State Building B-25 crash, Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The crash showed how unready even the tallest building on earth was for the air age, and it fed the case for tighter control over city airspace. Betty Lou Oliver's fall still stands in the record books as the longest survived elevator plunge.
Sources
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