Singapore—A woman who fell from the fourth floor of her apartment building on Saturday (Jan 11) has been hospitalized. She was believed to have been gathering laundry from outside the flat, which belonged to a friend, when the fall occurred.
The 27-year-old Vietnamese national is in the country for a holiday with some friends.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) say they received an alert at around 7:20 on Saturday evening that an individual had fallen from a height at Block 82 Whampoa Drive.
The woman was conscious after her fall, and authorities brought her to Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) for medical treatment.
She was supposed to have gone home on Sunday, January 13, but her return trip has been delayed because of the incident.
Chinese evening newspaper Shin Min Daily News reported one of the woman’s friends as saying, “Although her head was bleeding yesterday, her head injury is not serious. However, her leg is fractured.”
Police are currently looking into the incident.
Shin Min Daily News added that a bamboo pole on a second-floor apartment could be seen hanging from a laundry rack, which could have helped break the woman’s fall. It also said that the woman had been struggling with a bamboo pole on a clothes rack when she fell.
She fell while she was still holding on to the pole, which ended up getting stuck on the second floor of the building, and most likely saved her from more grievous injuries as it softened the impact of her landing, Shin Min Daily News reported.
The Vietnamese national landed outside the apartment, in front of the back door of a beauty salon on the building’s ground floor, and suffered from a leg fracture. Bloodstains could be seen at the area where she fell.
Shin Min quotes a salon employee, Ms Jiang, as saying that a loud noise had captured her attention and when she opened the door she could see the woman with a head wound on the ground. She and her fellow salon workers then rushed out to help the woman.
Ms Jiang said, “I quickly called the ambulance, and a group of people had also gathered to help.
But we didn’t dare move her because we didn’t know how serious her injuries were.”
Moments later, the woman’s friend came down from the fourth floor to see what had happened to her.
Photos from the incident, published by crowdsourced news site STOMP, showed a woman lying on the ground in front of a building, with what looked like blood under her head, as well as another photo of a woman in a stretcher being wheeled to an ambulance. -/TISG
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