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The Final Destination franchise revolves around people who managed to escape a brush with death only to meet a grisly fate after the Grim Reaper comes to collect. You thankfully don’t have to worry about that happening in real life, but one man in California may still want to err on the side of caution after his decision to switch up his nap routine helped him avoid being struck by a piece of ice that crashed through the roof of his home.
“Casadastraphobia” is the name given to the fear of falling upward into the sky, which I think most people would agree is slightly less rational than the fear of being struck by an object that suddenly falls from it. However, you could also say a fear of that second occurrence is pretty irrational when you consider incidents like that tend to be few and far between.
Thousands of meteorites end up surviving their journey through the Earth’s atmosphere on an annual basis, and while one expert estimates five of them make impact on land each day, the odds of them crashing down on the exact spot where someone is situated are pretty low.
There have been some freak incidents, like a battery that was seemingly discarded from the International Space Station that crashed into the home of a family in Florida in 2024. The airplanes that are constantly making their way through our skies can also pose a threat, and it appears one of them was responsible for a scary situation that recently unfolded in California.
The FAA launched an investigation after a chunk of ice seemingly fell from a plane and plummeted through the roof outside of Los Angeles
There’s only so much airplane pilots can do to prevent ice from forming on their craft, but plenty of precautions are taken both before and during flights to stop it from forming due to the potentially deadly ramifications of that particular substance.
Those pitfalls usually apply to the people on a flight, but it’s possible for ice to impact people on the ground if it manages to form at cruising altitude before becoming dislodged when a plane encounters warmer conditions as it prepares to land.
According to KABC, that was seemingly what happened last Friday when a chunk of ice crashed through the ceiling of a home in Whittier, California around 11:15 A.M. Its resident, Yuder Grau, was taking a nap in his bed, which was thankfully a departure from his usual routine of sleeping on the couch where the block landed.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn shared photos of the ice (which was described as having a “bad smell”) and the damage it managed to cause, including a sizeable hole in the room it crashed through. The home is directly under a flight path for planes landing at Los Angeles International Airport, and all signs point to the ice falling from one that was passing overhead.
Hahn penned a letter to the FAA pushing for an investigation, and the agency confirmed it will be taking a closer look at what transpired after receiving the incident report.