An Australian tourist who plunged from a bridge into the Zambezi River after her bungee cord snapped has described how she fought to the surface and swam for shore with her legs still bound, in an accident that prompted a temporary suspension of jumps at Victoria Falls and a public safety demonstration by Zambia’s tourism…
An Australian tourist who plunged from a bridge into the Zambezi River after her bungee cord snapped has described how she fought to the surface and swam for shore with her legs still bound, in an accident that prompted a temporary suspension of jumps at Victoria Falls and a public safety demonstration by Zambia’s tourism minister. The incident occurred on New Year’s Eve 2011 during a 111-metre leap from the Victoria Falls Bridge, which straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Video recorded at the site shows 22-year-old Perth backpacker Erin Langworthy falling toward the river before the cord separated near the bottom of her descent, pitching her headfirst into fast-moving water. Langworthy told Australian television that after slamming into the river she blacked out for an instant, surfaced, and then fought through rapids as the remnants of the bungee line snagged on rocks and debris. “It went black straight away and I felt like I’d been slapped all over,” she said in the days after the fall. “I actually had to swim down and yank the bungee cord out of whatever it was caught on to make it to the surface.” She managed to free herself underwater, reach the bank on the Zimbabwean side and haul herself out before rescuers arrived. She was later evacuated to South Africa for treatment of a fractured collarbone and severe bruising.
Authorities said the leap took place from the British-built road and rail span that sits roughly 111 metres—about 364 feet—above the Zambezi gorge downstream of the falls. The river in that stretch is known locally for crocodiles and strong currents, conditions that compounded the risk of entering at speed with ankles still lashed together. Footage of the jump, broadcast by Australia’s Channel Nine and other outlets, captured the cord snapping while Langworthy still had distance to fall and showed her striking the surface before being swept toward rapids. “The water was going quite quickly and then I started to hear the roaring,” she said, describing the disorientation of being dragged under and pushed up again in waves before she found a line to the bank. From the river’s edge she was taken first to a nearby clinic and then to a hospital across the region, where doctors set her collarbone and treated soft-tissue injuries.
Within days, operators and officials moved to steady tourist confidence at one of Africa’s signature adventure sites. Shearwater Adventures, a Zimbabwean tourism company associated with the operation at the bridge, suspended bungee jumping for two days to allow an internal audit and a review of procedures and equipment. “We voluntarily suspended bungee jumping… to allow an audit of the accident that happened,” company spokesman Clement Mukwasi said at the time, adding that the pause would give “auditors, management and crew the opportunity to analyse the causes of the broken cord and review the new system and procedures without distractions.” Jumps were expected to resume after the weekend.
Zambia’s tourism minister Given Lubinda publicly defended the safety record and then staged a demonstration of his own, making the leap from the same bridge in an effort to reassure visitors. He later invited Langworthy to return as a guest. Citing a decade of commercial operations and tens of thousands of jumps per year at the site, Lubinda said incidents were extraordinarily rare. “The bungee has proven to be a very viable operation considering that more than 50,000 tourists jump on it every year,” he said. “It has been in operation for 10 years. This is the first time I am hearing of an incident. The probability of an incident is one in 500,000 jumps.” His comments reflected both the commercial importance of adventure tourism to the twin border towns of Livingstone and Victoria Falls and the urgency officials felt to keep visitors coming during the southern Africa holiday season.
The accident’s mechanics were straightforward, if unforgiving. A polyurethane-cored elastic rope—chosen to stretch and recoil to a calibrated maximum under load—failed while Langworthy was still descending, leaving approximately thirty metres of severed cord attached to her ankles as she entered the gorge. That trailing section repeatedly fouled on rocks and debris, pulling her below the surface. Langworthy said white-water rafting the previous day gave her a rough mental map of the river’s behavior and some rules for surviving its hydraulics: float feet-first when possible, protect the head, and when trapped beneath, drive down through the circulating water to escape the recirculating pocket. “It’s like being in waves, you get sucked under and then you pop up,” she said, describing the moment she forced herself to dive to free the rope and then broke back into the air. The account matched what rescuers and witnesses observed from the bank as she moved with the current and angled for the Zimbabwe side.
Reuters and Australian media outlets reported that Langworthy described her escape as “definitely a miracle,” a phrase she used more than once while discussing the impact and the forces at work in the gorge. “It felt like I had been slapped all over,” she told Channel Nine, a physical shorthand for the diffuse pain from blunt-force entry at speed. Doctors confirmed a fractured collarbone and widespread contusions but, remarkably, no spinal or intracranial injury, outcomes medical staff attributed to entering on an angle rather than flat to the water and to the turbulence of the river dissipating some of the momentum. After initial stabilization near the bridge she was moved to a larger facility for diagnostics and recovery and was later photographed giving a thumbs-up from a hospital bed.
In the wake of the incident, investigators focused on the integrity and inspection cycle of the rope, the rigging sequence, and whether any environmental factors—temperature, moisture, or micro-cuts in the sheath—could have weakened the line. Shearwater’s two-day pause allowed engineers to test equipment and revise checklists; officials on both sides of the border emphasized that the suspension was voluntary and precautionary. The site is among the region’s most heavily trafficked adventure attractions, drawing jumpers who often package the experience with white-water rafting, canyon swings and zip lines in the same corridor. On any given day, guides usher lines of tourists into harnesses as trains pass over the bridge and mist rises from the cataract upstream. In that routine, operators said, protocols had kept thousands safe over many years, even if the footage of the cord parting in mid-air now sat uneasily beside those assurances.
The government’s messaging hinged on two points: an accident did occur and is under review; and the broader risk profile, expressed in millions of successful jumps worldwide and a decade without a similar failure at this site, remained low. Lubinda underscored the latter in statistical terms and in his own leap. His invitation for Langworthy to return, and his decision to make the jump himself, were calculated to show confidence at the highest level and to meet a churn of anxious inquiries from abroad. Press notices at the time framed the actions as both a tourism-sector triage and a response befitting a destination whose economy leans heavily on visitors’ appetite for spectacle and adrenaline.
For Langworthy, the experience produced a spare chronology that, she suggested, would always be measured in seconds: the countdown on the platform; the rush of air and the growing roar from the gorge; the snap; the cold; the first disoriented grasp for the surface; the decision to dive because the only way out was under. Her interviews did not dwell on the crocodiles locals say inhabit the eddies and banks, beyond acknowledging the obvious risk of being in the water at all. What she returned to instead were small, practical details: how the rope caught; the way the current spun her; the relief of finding purchase on rock near the Zimbabwean bank. She lit on the fact that she had seen the river from a raft a day earlier and that it gave her, in the moment, something to reach for that was more useful than fear.
Officials in both countries stressed coordination across the border, noting that the bridge, gorge and riverbanks require responses from separate jurisdictions that operate together daily for tourism and trade. In the days after the incident, crews from the operator and local medical staff reviewed how quickly they had reached the scene and whether equipment staged for standard rescues needed to be adapted for a jumper in the water with ankles bound. Operators said staff are trained for a range of contingencies but that a severed line requires a mix of river skills and rope work not commonly used in routine bungee recoveries. The footage, widely circulated, will likely feature in future training sessions on both sides of the border as a case study in how a rare mechanical failure cascades into a high-risk water rescue.
The episode also brought renewed attention to the way operators explain hazard to customers at high-consequence sites. Bungee jumping relies on the counterintuitive promise that the energy of a fall will be safely absorbed and returned by engineered materials calibrated to the jumper’s mass. Guides on the Victoria Falls Bridge talk visitors through that physics while cinching harnesses on the platform and clipping heavy-duty carabiners into place. The failure on 31 December 2011, despite redundant elements elsewhere in the system, will be pored over in inspection logs and supplier records, the company said, even as it framed the event as an outlier in a long operational history. For regulators and ministers, the messaging has tended to combine empathy for the injured with reminders that the falling and bouncing that draw people to the site every day do so within an envelope of risk that, while narrow, is never zero.
In the months and years after the fall, Langworthy’s name continued to be linked to the gorge in retellings that sometimes outstripped the facts of her injuries and recovery. On the record, she spent roughly a week under care after the accident and later discussed the possibility—half in jest, half in defiance—of jumping again one day. What remains indisputable in the contemporaneous accounts is the sequence she narrates plainly: a leap, a snap, a river, and a methodical fight through water and rope toward air and stone. The rest belongs to engineers and auditors and to a tourism economy that, in that fortnight in January 2012, had to convince the world that the cameras could keep rolling while the industry fixed what had failed.
By the time Shearwater’s audit concluded and jumps resumed, the Victoria Falls Bridge had returned to its equilibrium: freight trains rumbling across the span; mist rising from Mosi-oa-Tunya upstream; guides calling out from the platform; and the steady stream of visitors stepping into harnesses and looking down into the gorge. It is a setting that owes its magnetism to the same vertical distance that nearly killed a young woman and to a river whose power made her survival unlikely and—by her account—miraculous. “Yes, I think it’s definitely a miracle that I survived,” she said. The remark, like the numbers cited by officials, is at once simple and unanswerable: a statement of thanks, a nod to probability, and the last word from the only person who went over the edge that day and came back to tell the rest what it felt like.