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No child should touch a gun or pistol, or on any account present one at another person. We behold a little boy shooting his sister dead!

And:

Here we see the danger of playing with lighted candles. One little girl has set the bed-curtains on fire, and the other her hair; and both are in great danger of being burnt to death, unless someone grants them speedy assistance.

From The Book of Accidents (1831), with excellent woodcut illustrations.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

With headlines like “Octopus ride accident injures two” and “Ferris wheel catastrophe kills five”, it will be hard to look at amusement park rides in quite the same light.

Not that they ever seemed on par with the safety of something like, say, bonsai gardening.

(via BoingBoing)

Interesting enough for the subject matter — the mysterious skyjacker who disappeared from a plane¹ with some gracious amount of money, never to be found again (the skyjacker that is; some of the money was found, maybe) — this article from the AP is probably best for the very last sentence:

“Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream,” Carr said. “Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle.”

The FBI’s presenting, as they say, “for the first time” to the public, new & exciting information.

In case you do remember that odd uncle.

¹ Which is to say, jumped.

When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was “pterodactyl,” Smith said.

…

The man was treated and released at Central Washington Hospital, hospital officials said.

No word on the pterodactyl’s injuries.

(HeraldNet: “Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile,” by Rachel Schleif [29 Dec 07]; via BoingBoing)

Yes, it can happen to you. Well, maybe not you, but someone else:

Dropping something may have saved Joy Horton’s life. The 73-year-old woman was preparing some food in her western New York home on Monday morning when she dropped a spoon on the floor of her kitchen. When she bent down, her house exploded.

…

Fire officials said that because Horton was bending down when the explosion occurred, the kitchen sink and counter top helped keep debris from hitting her.

(via BoGlo/AP: “Spoon drop saves woman’s life” [Aug 21, 2007])

Three-year-old Robert Moore went fishing for a stuffed replica of Sponge Bob and ended up trapped in a vending machine.

…

A stuffed Sponge Bob in a vending machine’s bin caught Robert’s eye. He tried without success to fish it out with a plastic crane.  “I told him I could get it for him,” his grandmother said. “He’s a character. He said, ‘Oh no, I can get it.’” When she turned her back to get another dollar for a second try, Robert took off his coat and squeezed through an opening in the machine. He landed in the stuffed animal cube.  “I turned around and looked for him, and he said, ‘Oma, I’m in here,” Bierdemann said. “I thought I would have a heart attack.”

And in the end… he didn’t even get the stuffed Sponge Bob.

(AP/Mercury News: “Toddler gets stuck in vending machine.” [Oct 24, 2006])

…you won’t find very much on the internet about the elusive “out-of-control doughnut trailer”, never mind how much danger it portends.

This is not new news, nor is it relevant in the sense of being anything anyone needs to worry about, but it certainly is curious:

Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

(Reuters: “Man Catches Fire During Surgery.” [April 18, 2005]; the original Reuters link is no longer available, though you can find postings of the article by searching for it.)

BERLIN (Reuters) - A pack of wild boar wandered onto a German motorway, causing a five-car pileup and leaving one motorist injured and eight of the animals dead, police said on Saturday.

The cars on the Dresden-Berlin motorway hit the boar at high speed. One car flipped, injuring the 33-year-old woman driver.

(Reuters: “Pack of Wild Boar Causes Motorway Pileup” [November 1, 2004])

Google saves a man’s life; The Weather Channel could have prevented a woman from falling off a second-floor balcony (although possibly not, too).

The second “could have” is a little gimmicky, since it refers to the fact that the woman fell while step outside to check the weather. Whoever wrote the article’s headline presumably thought that, had the woman been watching the Weather Channel, she never would have stepped out onto the faulty balcony. And hence not fallen. Go figure. (I was initially conned by the headline, thinking that a woman was in fact saved by the Weather Channel.)

The first is less gimmicky, more genuine, and not a little startling: a journalist was captured in Iraq and released in part thanks to Google. His captors thought he was a CIA operative. He said he was an Australian journalist. They Googled his name and found out he was telling the truth. Let him go, they did. Which all makes an interesting story, though presumably there was more to it than that. I’m no expert in spycraft, and the CIA may have its problems, but I’m guessing [see above, "no expert"] that the Agency could with relative ease make an informant seem like a reporter, particularly if all that was required was adjusting a few web pages.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a bull moose hanging by its antlers from an electrical power line in the middle of the Alaska wilderness.

This is one of those truly bizarre stories that seems absolutely hilarious until you actually think about it, at which point it turns morbid and sad. (Check out the article for a surprising amount of detail regarding the moose and its unfortunate accident.)

“It’s just an unbelievable story,” said Gabriel Marian, president of City Electric Inc., the contractor erecting the power line to the mine. “The only unfortunate part is we had to shoot the moose.

“It would be more of a feel-good story if we had let it down and it ran off,” he lamented.

(Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: “Wired Moose,” by Tim Mowry [October 17, 2004])

Really, it could have happened to anybody.

A 20-ton piece of road machinery mowed down a fence and a couple of trees on property belonging to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (news - bio) after the brakes apparently slipped and the machine rolled away.

“It was a freak accident,” said Michael Trujillo, director of public works for Taos County.

(AP: “20-Ton Machine Mows Down Rumsfeld’s Fence” [August 20, 2004])

Continue Reading »

…though there are obviously many more…

BEIJING (Reuters) - A boiler that exploded at a Chinese sauna sailed over a six-story building and landed on an old man crossing the road, Xinhua news agency said.

The 63-year-old pedestrian was killed instantly and three people injured in Sunday’s bizarre accident in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Xinhua quoted local police as saying.

“A passerby tried to escape when he saw the large object flying toward him, but he was hurt in his leg,” Xinhua said. “Two workers in a restaurant next to the bathhouse were also injured after a wall of the restaurant collapsed.”

(Here are freak accidents numbers 1 & 2, if you’re curious.)

(via Reuters: “Boiler Kills on Impact After Sauna Launch” [September 13, 2004])

In the same vein as this earlier post on a freak vending machine accident, here is freak portable toilet accident #1 (still waiting for word of #2):

A portable toilet exploded Tuesday after a man who was inside it lit a cigarette. Emergency workers said the man was not severely injured and drove himself to Clay-Battelle Community Health Center. … The explosion, which occurred in Blacksville, resulted from a buildup of methane gas inside the portable toilet. The methane did not “take too kindly” to the lit cigarette, said a spokeswoman for Monongalia Emergency Medical Services.

Pretty much by definition, freak accidents don’t happen every day. Particularly freak accidents involving exploding vending machines that expel poisonous gas.

Yes, freak accidents involving exploding vending machines that happen, through the wonders of happy coincidence, to produce something like phosgene gas (used in WWI as a chemical warfare agent)—these aren’t things that happen every day.

But, you know. They happen. Not very often, but they happen.

Exploding vending machines—these are things we have to live with.

“The vending machine I was working on…”
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“It exploded.”
“Exploded?”
“Not the whole thing, of course. Not a violent explosion or anything, just a minor internal explosion. A small fire.”
“Well, are you okay?”
“I think so. I’m a little dizzy, though.”
“Dizzy? Do you need to sit down?”
“Maybe.”
“Is the machine still on fire?”
“Oh… right. I… I don’t think so. …I—”
“Yes?”
“My throat burns, just a little bit.”
“Why don’t you sit down.”
“I don’t feel so well.”
“Good God, man… I think you’ve been exposed to phosgene gas.”
“But… how?”
“You see, when the fire contacted the freon from the cooling system, it must have somehow, through the wonders of chemistry, transformed it into phosgene.”
“My vision’s a little blurry.”
“We’ve got to evacuate.”
“Before it’s too late.”

(Reuters: “Here’s Something That Doesn’t Happen Every Day…” [June 25, 2004])