A bizarrely random death…

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

The town where I used to live had a network of limestone caves outside town that, in addition to being quarried, were also used for temperature-stable storage. One evening, there was a rock fall from the ceiling, and it crushed a vehicle in which a woman in her 40s was sitting, and it killed her instantly. Thing was, nobody who knew her could figure out what she was doing there.

Occam’s Razor in action! She was married, with two teenagers, and she was having an affair with a man who worked there; she was waiting for him to go on his lunch break so she could, ahem, join (with?) him.

22

About 15 years ago, as I approaching home from work, I noticed several police cars and ambulances in the parking lot.

It turns out that a woman had committed suicide by jumping off the balcony of her apartment and landed on a guy who was visiting family just as he was about to enter the building.

Initially, the police suspected it was a double-suicide or a murder-suicide, and it took them some time to finally understand what had happened.

23

It can also happen with rolling bales of hay.

24

Popular Dallas radio DJ John LaBella was killed when the rig in front of him, overstacked wit forklift parts, hit a bridge and sent one of those parts catapulting back into LaBella’s car when he was driving home from his shift.

25

Stay away from

Rooms containing rusty chains
Manure pits
Grain silos
Overinflated tires

26

Yeah…I’ve read that too. No way to guess at it unless you know. Seems harmless enough and then poof…you’re unconscious and then dead a few minutes later and never saw it coming.

27

Here’s a bit more detail from a somewhat more normal site (kinda)…

28

I had a rather bizarre motorcycle accident when I was 11 years old. Very nearly killed me.

I had a 100cc Yamaha enduro. LT2. I was ‘dirt biking’ in a country ditch that had a bit of snow on it. There are culverts in country ditches to allow the farmers access to their fields. I did not see this one.

I hit it, and went ass over tea kettle. I had a helmet on. But my head ended up getting sucked in between the rear fender and spinning rear tire. The fender went between my head and my helmet. It scalped me. 130 stitches. I probably came close to ‘bleeding out’ head wounds are that way.

The doc did a great job, You can hardly even tell that I went through that.

29

A mysterious disappearance blamed on…The Bulge.

30

In San Francisco there is a main avenue near Lake Merced in the southwest called Brotherhood Way that takes you to Sunset Blvd, a main north-south thoroughfare that bypasses the much busier 19th Avenue (CA Hwy 1). I take it all the time.

On Brotherhood Way one rainy, stormy day about 5 years ago a woman was driving there and the storm blew down a large tree branch that fell on her car. It killed her instantly.

Talk about random. And bizarre.

It’s stories like this and others shared here (@enipla , wow! Glad you survived that one!) that help to make us more aware of potential hazards. You can’t live your life in fear, at least I don’t want to, but increasing awareness will help you avoid potentially fatal situations.

31

Lotta these are just law of large numbers things.

Across the entire USA tree branches big enough to kill somebody fall by the hundreds every day. Fortunately there are a lot more trees without people standing / driving under them than with. So most branches crash harmlessly to the ground.

Decent bet at least a few tire/wheel assemblies go flying somewhere every single day in our fair benighted land. Happily the spacetime confluence of flying wheel and another car / person is usually a clean miss.

Remember these important tenets of basic physics:

  • Time is Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t all happen at once.
  • Space is Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t all happen in the same place.

Put those two together and you’ll usually be fine. Usually. :wink:

32

Yes, usually. And we often are. Frequently enough. But sometimes bad things do happen.

Another one. Pedestrians walking across the Golden Gate Bridge are generally safe. The walkway safely ‘contains’ pedestrians from the roadway traffic, and for a parent you can easily think that your little children can walk ahead of you because there’s really “no place else they can go” (because the walkway will contain them). The barrier between pedestrians and traffic is good and effective.

About maybe 15-20 years ago a visiting tourist family was walking the GG Bridge when suddenly their young toddler disappeared at the side railing, not where the traffic roadway is but the other side where you look out onto the bay and the city.

Hidden from view, it turns out there is a gap between the bottom of the vertical railing and the horizontal walkway. The gap is small, but a small child can fall through it. If you walk to the vertical railing, at just the right spot (at just the right angle) you can see it but otherwise it is hidden from view.

The gap shows that it’s a crevice through which a child would fall from the bridge to the rocks below, or to the bay waters below depending on where you were on the bridge. That’s a far distance to fall. It would be fatal.

That’s exactly what happened. The small child fell to their death.

I’ve walked the GG Bridge many times and did not know this. After reading about this I brought my 3 young kids there for a nice outing, and as we walked the bridge I positioned myself at just the right angle and could see how that child could fall through. The view of the hazard was stunning.

Trying to be ‘the good dad’ I talked to my kids about how you can be enjoying your day and not realize there’s a potentially fatal hazard right where you are. I then walked them over to the crevice, at just the right angle, and showed it to them and explained how just the week before a young child fell to their death through that gap.

The sight through that crevice, when you’re at just the right angle and seeing how it’s big enough for a child, and looking down to the rocks below, was stunning.

San Francisco has since installed a tight cable along that crevice, effectively cutting that gap in half such that no child can ever slip through that space again. But you can see the hazard today.

33

The most bizarre, random way that a person I knew was killed was a kid in my neighborhood who was struck by lightning in his driveway. I guess lightning strikes themselves aren’t bizarre, but as a cause of death, I would say they are.

Even more random and unlikely is that a tornado damaged the same house about 20 years later while the parents still lived there. I mean, what are the odds of both losing your kid to lightning and having your house damaged by a tornado?

34

We can tell. :wink:

Seriously though…glad you got through it all. I was proud when I got four stitches once. 130 is beyond my ability to fathom. This and other stories are why I, at the least, always always wear a helmet when riding anything. No helmet, no go. (with the caveat there are different levels of helmet…bike helmet is fine for a bicycle but not a motorcycle…on my scooter I have a full face helmet which is less than a motorcycle helmet).

35

Lightning strikes the earth 8 million times per day globally (about 100 per second). It is amazing people aren’t hit more often. But, lightning usually is attracted to things other than humans which is good for us. Still…it happens (as you just noted).

36

I found articles of when that happened on the GG Bridge. It happened 28 years ago, in 1997. The little girl was 2. She fell 180 feet to her death (sounds a bit similar to Eric Clapton’s little boy, Conor Clapton. Another bizarre one.).

➜ https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PAGE-ONE-Dad-Calls-Girl-s-Death-Preventable-3303640.php ■

➜ https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PAGE-ONE-Girl-2-Dies-In-Fall-From-Gate-2788651.php ■

➜ Girl Falls From Golden Gate Bridge ■

From this, ➜ Girl falls from Golden Gate Bridge - UPI Archives ■ , …

“Officials with the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District say the gap Gauri (the little girl) fell through runs along the entire 1.7-mile sidewalk.”

37

It happens.

Once in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in the early 1990s there was a bad night thunderstorm. Lots of lightning. Heavy rain. Over at the Comm Platoon (Communications; I was in Ops Platoon, Operations) a young Marine was walking guard duty. On his back was strapped a radio so that he could be reached.

On that radio was a tall antenna…

Yes you guessed it. He was called on the radio. When he answered it a lightning bolt zapped that antenna, and him. Fortunately he survived.

When I visited him in the hospital he showed me the damage to his chest. A softball-sized divot was centered in his sternum. It looked nasty, and it will for the rest of his life. But he is alive and apparently without any long lasting negative effects.

38

According to this page on the CDC website:

From 2006 through 2021, there were 444 lightning strike deaths in the United States.

If both '06 and '21 are included, that’s 16 years. 444/16 equals 27.75.

Not a huge number, certainly, but more than the five people killed by sharks each year, worldwide.

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As an aside…men are four times more likely than women to be struck by lightning.

I’ll leave it to the readers to guess why.

40

I’ve used the odds of getting hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark as an example of an improbable event, usually in reference to winning Powerball or Mega Millions.

I mean, it could happen.