Water Balloons Falling From The Sky

Even though some of them were married and had children, there was still a touch of adolescence running through the group.

They worked on the thirty second floor of the very art-deco skyscraper that inspired the Empire State Building. It was constructed just before air conditioning came on the scene and was equipped with vertical-sliding windows.

The six of them worked on assignments with little supervision, at their own pace.

When projects dried up in the summer the co-workers would sneak out to a newsstand to kill time. They often stopped at a gag shop that sold hand-buzzers, sneezing powder and whoopee cushions. That’s where they happened upon the balloons

A little physics enters into the story.

Water weighs .036127 pounds per cubic inch. A balloon filled to the size of the grapefruit (100 cubic inches) weighs around three pounds. The vertical drop from their office windows to the street was 380 feet. The acceleration of gravity near the earth is expressed as g = 32.2 feet/sec^2.

Most of the water balloons smashed harmlessly on the lower concrete portion of the skyscraper. But every once in a while, with proper thrust and just the right trajectory, one would hit a bus as it was taking on passengers directly below.

A violent shockwave would radiate out from the center of the roof of the bus and then bounce back to the middle again. The hollow interior of a full-sized municipal bus is essentially a metal drum. The impact inside must have been deafening.

We are all allotted a certain number of do-overs in life. Those bored people working up on thirty two were young enough to have a supply mulligans and get-out-of-jail cards left to draw on. Sirens never sounded on the streets below and the police never showed up in their reception area. They were lucky.

Some years later one of the culprits woke up in a cold sweat. It wasn’t until then that he realized he may have missed committing involuntary manslaughter by only a few feet or a few seconds one way or another.

Nothing good ever comes from objects that fall out of the sky.