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7-year-old girl survives fall from 12th floor of condo in Kumamoto

16 Comments

A 7-year-old girl fell from the balcony of her 12th-floor apartment in Kumamoto but survived after she hit thick netting covering a garbage disposal area below, police said Friday.

According to police, the incident occurred at around 4:50 p.m. Thursday. NTV reported that the girl fell about 36 meters before hitting the nylon netting. Police said she suffered a broken pelvis and other bruises but her condition is stable.

The girl's mother was quoted by police as saying she was in the kitchen at the time of the incident.

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16 Comments
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Miraculous considering the distance she had fallen. (Back in 1987, a 3-year-old girl in a Tokyo suburb survived a 250-foot fall (26th-floor) from her family's balcony. She landed in a cluster of azalea bushes.)

7 ( +7 / -0 )

Glad she is OK...but again??!

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Props to her guardian angel for doing his job.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

Saved by a nylon netting - happy for this young girl

2 ( +2 / -0 )

It's predictable in its certainy because so many here believe in 'good' fate, that it won't happen to them or theirs, more than any other place I have lived. That's not how reality is. I can imagine even now that when on hearing the news of another child's death next month from falling from a 'mansion' that in household's across Japan they'll be a collective, 'Taihen desu ne'' and there in will end the lesson to the children in attendance to the utterances from their parents. THAT culture has to stop, why on the news isn't there even a 'Don't do THIS kids!' or a JA commercial, because the parents do not seemingly discuss, teach and scare the children into NOT doing this, or playing near rivers alone, or, or, or... Teach children DANGER.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

Wow! I think they should install this netting around every apartment block.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

Its her guardian angel who save her God is always in control! Thanks God!

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

Wow, that is an adventure she will not forget. Good that she hit the netting (they showed it on TV, it almost like a perfectly placed safety net), and I bet she will be more careful when playing on the balcony from now on.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Her survival was miraculous, and Im glad she did survive. Shame her mother didn't have the balcony doors child-proofed.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

When we lived in an apartment here, I hated those darned balconies. Kids couldn't see over them, so they tried to hop up to get a better view. It took constant attention to keep the kids away. If it weren't for having to dry the futons, I'd say net-in or glass-in all balconies or perhaps add cantilevered netting to the building code.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Lawren:

" Shame her mother didn't have the balcony doors child-proofed. "

With a 7-year old you generally don´t need to think about child-proofing any more. She is a second grader, not a toddler!

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Clearly you do need to have the doors child proofed, since this 7 year old didnt have the maturity not to climb up onto the balcony while her mother was busy, and managed to accidentally fall!

2 ( +3 / -1 )

WilliB: "She is a second grader, not a toddler!"

A second-grader who did what toddlers and kids older than her are often reported as doing -- falling off balconies. Fortunately in this case we're not reading about a death and instead reading about a miraculous survival. HOW did she survive? a safety net. As such, I agree such safety nets should be put up wherever possible, and agree with those that the balcony should have been child-proofed. And by that I don't necessarily mean crazy locks or electrical sockets blocked up, but a lot of these cases involve parents turning a blind eye or being absent altogether when kids are out playing on balconies that are also often cluttered with things said kids can climb up on and subsequently go over the railing. If she's too old to have any childproofing, as you suggest, why did she fall off the balcony?

2 ( +4 / -2 )

My balcony has never been a space which is available for the children to play on. I lock the doors, they keys are unavailable. They cannot get out there without me or their dad. You can tell a child a hundred times not to do something because it is dangerous, it won't necessarily sink in for a while.

Then again I dont let them walk home alone either, nor go out to play unsupervised. Call me overprotective, but my children have never had a preventable accident. This lax and lazy parenting in Japan is putting the few children they have at risk.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Happy to hear she survived the fall...

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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