The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool (18 page)

Darwin Award: Crushing De’feet

Confirmed True by Darwin

28 NOVEMBER 2006, AUSTRIA

A man who had been reported missing was found the following morning in a trash compactor, victim of an industrial accident. Once the videotape from a monitoring camera was reviewed, all became clear.

He worked for a parcel delivery service in Hall in Tirol. He had loaded the hydraulic press with empty boxes and started it up. At that point the longtime employee walked to the edge of the filling hole and used his foot to press the boxes farther into the hydraulic trash compactor.

His foot was seized by the press, and he was drawn into the chamber and crushed. He was not discovered until his colleagues needed to use the press again the next day.

Reference: tirol.orf.at

Darwin Award: Chemistry Went to Her Head

Confirmed True by Darwin

2 FEBRUARY 2008, BULGARIA

It was a cold but sunny February afternoon. Anna, a biology teacher from Sofia, was driving two friends home from a memorial service. Suddenly the vehicle stopped. Bystanders saw all three occupants dash from the car to a nearby manhole and start pouring down liquids and powders from various bottles and jars.

Apparently, the biology teacher had been performing chemistry experiments in her free time and had some leftover noxious chemicals. It is still not entirely clear what the chemicals were, but two of the bottles were labeled diethyl ether and methanol, both highly flammable liquids. The former is also used as a sedative, so one explanation for their actions is that they felt dizzy from the ether vapors and thought it was a good idea to pour them in the sewer.

As it turns out, a good idea it definitely was not. The cocktail of flammable substances in the enclosed space of the sewer caused an explosion so powerful that it launched the manhole cover into the air, decapitating the (briefly) surprised Anna. Left without a head on her shoulders, she decided it was time to kick the bucket.

The other two people were not unharmed, but were alive. They were taken to the hospital with burns on their faces. They may not regain their eyesight, but hopefully will be able to speak clearly enough to tell their children that tossing random chemicals down the drain is not as wise as it might first appear.

Reference: focus-news.net

Darwin Award: Silage Spreader

Unconfirmed

1992, UK

I am an injury lawyer, and for many years I represented the National Farmers’ Union Mutual, an insurance company specializing in (yep) farms. Farmworkers do the most insane things that never ceased to amaze me, but this one takes the biscuit.

I was investigating a fatal accident on a farm in Hampshire. The deceased, an experienced hand, drove a silage spreader hitched to a tractor. Molasses was added to the spreader by parking it beneath a molasses tank and opening the tap. The silage was mixed by three large steel augers rotating in the belly of the open-topped spreader. The tractor was then driven into the fields, and the feed mix merrily flung far and wide from the spreader.

To access the molasses tap one climbs a ladder fixed to the tank. The subsequent inquest made it clear that our man, finding he had parked a mite short and could not reach the tap, decided not to get down and move the tractor five feet but rather to teeter along the edge of the open spreader hopper (a metal rim some three inches wide) wearing wellies covered in the usual farm muck, so he could save himself twenty seconds of precious work time.

Needless to say, time being so dear, he did not bother to disengage the PTO shaft of the tractor, which meant he was doing his balancing act above three bloody great steel augers rotating below him. Pity the poor workmate who eventually wondered why the tractor had been sitting there for an hour chugging gently away, put two and two together, and took a peep into the hopper.

Reference: Eyewitness account by Mike Clarke

Reader Comments:

“Going down on the farm.”

“A sticky situation.”

Darwin Award: A Breathtaking View

Unconfirmed

1989, SOUTH AFRICA

Downtown Johannesburg is continuously growing with the construction of modern new buildings. One such building was designed with a steel framework, intended to be clad in glass as a final touch.

On the eighteenth floor an engineer was inspecting the framework. He asked one of the workers to stand on a scaffold that was projecting through an open space where the glass panel would soon be mounted. With the worker acting as a counterweight, the engineer walked out onto the scaffold, checked the exterior, and came back in to continue his inspection.

After the engineer left, curiosity got the better of the worker. He walked out on the scaffold to see what the engineer had been looking at…. Fortunately the falling worker did not take out any pedestrians!

The worker removed himself from the gene pool out of sheer stupidity. But one does wonder whether that engineer is blithely continuing to ask trusting people to act as counterweights without explaining his reason, and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake!

Reference: Eyewitness account of a person
who was on lunch break when she saw the man fall

Reader Comments:

“Curiosity killed the cat!”

“Uhhh what was he looking at?”

“When engineers assume others are thinking the same thing.”

Darwin Award: Breathless

Confirmed True by Darwin

2007

An experienced forty-seven-year-old rescue diver was filming an underwater video of a wreck forty-four meters below sea level. He was in deep water, nine meters deeper than the recreational diving maximum, which warrants special training and extra safety considerations. To keep the audio track clear he turned off the alarms on his dive computer. His buddy, working on the other side of the wreck, did the same.

Defeating the safety…harbinger of so many Darwin Awards.

Sixteen minutes into the dive he was alone and out of air—a situation that should never sneak up on a diver. But he had turned off the safety alarms and swum out of sight of his buddy. The diver made an emergency ascent up the anchor line. At eighteen meters the divemaster tried to assist him, but the panicked diver refused to take an alternate air source. He continued his rapid flight to the surface, where he lost consciousness and could not be revived.

The cause of death: “Air embolism due to rapid ascent.”

Was it an accident? This experienced diver deliberately disregarded two basic safety rules: Pay attention to your gauges and stay within reach of your buddy. If he had attended to his gauges (and not turned off the alarms) he could have made a controlled ascent, including a decompression stop for safety. If he was near his buddy, they could have shared air as they both made a controlled ascent. Either precaution would have saved his life.

Reference:
Alert Diver
magazine, “Breathless on the Bottom,” March/April 2007

At Risk Survivor: He Kicked the Bucket

Confirmed True by Darwin

26 JANUARY 2007, TEXAS

In a world full of wonders man invented boredom. So work time becomes playtime. If you work in an office, you reproduce your naughty bits on the copy machine. If you work for an arc welding company? A plastic bucket, welding materials, and a single spark can combine for a playdate with a bang.

“I was on the computer when I heard the boom,” said a resident of the trailer park adjacent to the welding shop. “It shook my house. The whole neighborhood could feel it!”

Just for kicks a thirty-year-old welder and four coworkers had attempted to blow up a plastic bucket. Our man placed a striker, a spark-generating device used to start a welder’s torch, in the plastic bucket and sealed it. Then he filled the bucket with acetylene, an explosive gas used for welding. The plan was to toss the bucket in the air and watch it explode when the striker sparked.

Before that happened, however, our Darwin wannabe inadvertently kicked the plastic bucket, and the striker struck a spark. BOOM. The explosive force turned the lid of the bucket into a whirling saw that flew through the air and struck the man in his right arm, nearly severing it. He also sustained lacerations to his right leg.

No one else was injured in the blast, and no charges were filed, as it was felt that the perpetrator of the incident had already been sufficiently punished.

Reference: Galveston County
Daily News