1 in 29,200: that’s any individual’s chance of dying on a given day. (according to someone’s response to a thread of mine a while back)
There’s no rhyme or reason to it, no answer to the howling question “WHY?”. When your number is up, it doesn’t matter whether you deserved it or not, how good a person you were or how much you might have “mattered”. Best to try and appreciate your life, and everyone else’s , every day, while you can.
My google foo isn’t up to finding a cite right now, but a few years ago a motorist here was crushed and killed by a tree limb that just decided to fall for no discernible reason. How freakish is that?
I have a feeling some of them went on to work for the city. Possibly overseeing transit construction projects.
About two months ago a semi truck on a freeway lost a tire. The tire bounced over the median and landed right on someones windshield*. Killed him. The person it killed (Dr Neni) was a fairly well known doctor in the medical community in Milwaukee. The driver had no idea it happened until many hours later when someone at a truck stop (in Indiana?) told him about it.
*Can you imagine the forces involved in that? You have a car going one direction and a tire going the opposite, both probably going about 65 or so. And that semi tire I’m guessing has got to be what one maybe two hundred pounds at least.
He was identified by one of the first (emergency) responders. Apperently Dr Neni had saved this guys life at one point.
I dodged a tire coming at me just like that. It missed hitting me by about 18 inches. I could have touched it as if flew by my window at 60mph. At the time, I knew my life was in the hands of fate. Scary stuff.
I used to live very near Michigan International Speedway. One year during a race a tire on its axle came flying off a car and into the crowd of spectators and killed some people. They ended up shutting everything down out of respect for the dead.
Seriously, what kind of death doesn’t suck? So far in life I’m fortunate to have not lost anyone close to me in this way… but it’s only a matter of time…
One of the students on my residence hall staff was killed in a car wreck on the loop in Atlanta. Apparently a dog wandered on the roadway and she swerved to avoid it. She lost control and ran into another car. Really sad.
Locally there’s been a lot of retrospective stuff around year’s end about this accident.
Though, the person I still feel sorriest for is the poor schmuck of a truck driver - he couldn’t avoid the accident, and still knows he was driving the truck that five teen girls killed themselves hitting.
Worse is this accident that a poster told us about, which involved a close friend of hers. (mutter mutter) I can’t find it, now - it was an accident involving a trucker, crashing on the beltway around DC, and burning to death, with rescuers unable to get him out. The would-be rescuers reported he was alive and conscious before the flames drove them away. Can you imagine being stuck in a fire, seeing safety through the windscreen, just meters away, and being unable to get out, as the fire burns?
Finally, the story linked in this thread still gives me the heebie jeebies. I hate tunnels. I always have, and I suspect I always will.
How about falling out of a moving train while suffering a bout of diarrhea, then being hit by a train that’s traveling in the opposite direction?
If you want "bitter"ly ironic, you’d be better off with the London Beer Flood of 1814 :eek:
We had some rains and floods last year in June.
Hull was severely affected, the drain mouths got blocked.
Couple of men were trying to free some debris from a drain so it could clear the water, one of them got his foot stuck and the water rose up to his neck.
Emergency services did everything they could to save him, including providing air for him as the water rose over his airways.
They struggled for 4 hours to free him, they were desperate enough to prepare to amputate his foot, eventually he died from hypothermia
There is an online video of it…you don’t want to see it.
Let’s see sucky way’s to die. I spent quite a while thinking of all the death claims I have handled in the past 15 years. This was the worst.
A mother and her pregnant daughter were involved in a large traffic accident like one in Florida this week. Their car was struck by a trailer that had jack-knifed in the mass pile up. The roof of their car was crushed but the car was mostly intact trapped under the middle of the trailer. The collision forced open the gas tank of the car which caught fire. The doors were crushed closed and the window openings so reduced by the crushed roof that they could not get out. A man whose car was also damaged in the crash first tried to extinguish the fire with a small fire extinguisher from this car. When that didn’t work he then tried to free the trapped women. He tried to pry open the doors with chunks of metal wreckage and tried to pull the women out the crushed windows but couldn’t He sustained 3 degree burns on his hands and arms and had to be pulled away from the burning car by others. Listening to his deposition detailing the deaths of those women was the most heart breaking thing I’ve ever heard.
He didn’t die, but it’s bad enough… A 10 year old boy taking piano lessons yesterday was shot by a stray bullet from a nearby gas station robbery. He’s now paralyzed from the waist down.
When I was a teenager, there was a hill just outside my neighborhood that had train tracks at its foot. You’d drive over the hill, and when you reached the base, the tracks were only twenty feet or so away. At that time, the railroad crossing was marked only by signs, no gates or lights.
One night, one of my brother’s friends was driving home, and his route took him down that hill. He hadn’t been drinking or using drugs, and (so far as anyone could tell) wasn’t speeding. When he reached the bottom of the hill, he drove straight into a train and was killed instantly. By sheer bad luck, the train cars crossing that stretch of track at the time were empty flatcars, so my brother’s friend couldn’t see them while he was heading down the hill - and when he reached that short level stretch of road right in front of the tracks and spotted them, he simply didn’t have enough room left to stop in time.
Needless to say, the city put lights up at that railroad crossing in the aftermath of that particular accident.
The worst I personally knew of was a co-worker who threw a lit cigar out his car window which came back it, lit the papers in the car on fire, which caught to his clothes and burned him to death.
A young college kid in my state was driving back to school one night late and hit a deer. The animal came into the truck and apparently in the course of the accident and the deer hitting him he sustained a head injury that caused him to beome completely disoriented and confused.
The boy got out of the truck and wandered into the woods.
The parents began searching for him the next day when they realized he did not make it to school. They found the wrecked truck and combed the surrounding woods with no luck.
A few days later they finally found his body and realized he had been wandering around, lost, in his injured state. The coroner estimated he had only been dead a few hours when they found him.
I always shudder to think of him…hurt and lost and help arriving just moments too late.