……don’t put your foot in the wood chipper.
Seriously people, safety first.
Should I be glad that the URL is null and cannot be parsed?
Yes.
Yes I should. 
Hey Mods, can someone fix that coding.
Here’s the link
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WI_CHIPPER_DEATH_WIOL-?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Oh my god!
They didn’t even include a picture?
Jesus, what a way to go. Here’s an eyewitness account from another news article:
Just reading that makes me queasy.
What’s worse is that I’m sure he’s not the only one who nudges those logs with his feet to get them to go.
They need to post that article on every wood chipper sold. Ick.
There’s people really that stupid? Man, I sure feel sorry for nephew and his co-workers. No one should depart this world like that or be around someone who does.
From the first link:
I don’t think that last line was necessary.
I’m sure this has happened before, in fact I’m sure last time it happened, someone posted a link to a report demonstrating that it happens with alarming regularity.
Aoooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaghhhh. Dear God. Isn’t there a dead-man’s switch (pun unintended) on those things?
I hope that’s not too recognisable a sound.
Didn’t anyone think to look around and see if Steve Buscemi was lurking about?
I’m so going to hell.
Don’t feel to bad, that’s the first thing I thought of too. “So dat’s yer friend der in da wood chipper”
As for a dead mans switch. I was just thinking the same thing. There’s should be some sort of OFF/REVERSE switches all around the mouth of that thing. I suppose it could be an issue with branchs bumping them on the way in (they don’t want to get chipped either) but really, if he could have hit a switch himself, alot of this could have been prevented.
Emergency off switches break down, and they’re not often tested. I once had my right hand pulled into a dough-rolling machine, which should’ve stopped when the rollers were pushed so far apart, but didn’t. The problem? A piece of dough on the little lever measuring the gap between the rollers. It wouldn’t surprise me if, on a well-used wood chipper, that there was debris in the way of a kill switch (if there was one.)
Emergency stop switches are notorious for being abused, because they are often accidentally triggered, far more often than they are ever used in earnest; so they feel inconvenient, so people work around them, or hotwire them, or duct-tape cardboard over them, making them worse than useless.
This reminds me of many farm machinery accidents I hear about. It seems invariably that they result from people taking shortcuts around equipment they use all the time. When you use it all the time, you don’t think about the dangers and you become complacent. So, guys do things like trying to unplug the intakes of combines without shutting the machines down, and then get sucked into them - though most of the time this results “only” in mangled limbs and not deaths. Carpenters and power saws have a somewhat similar relationship.
Kids, when you’re playing with shit that can rip you apart with ease, never ever become complacent. Complacency kills you.
Coincidentally, this item appears on the “What’s New” section at Snopes today. It’s about the danger to pets and kids of paper shredders in the house. Sadly, the verdict is True in this case – there have been some heart-breaking accidents reported:
At least the kitten last week survived–will link cite later.
Hey, how’s your hand? (Is it sick that I’m picturing a ping-pong paddle hand?)
Here’s how fast that can change your life: Fifty years ago, my father-in-law was baling hay, on his last pass around the field just before lunch, looking forward to a half day off taking his wife and kids shopping. A bale got stuck in the feeder chute, where hay is packed tightly into the bale. If he’d stopped the machinery, he’d have had to pull most of a bale of packed hay out, scatter it in a windrow ahead of the baler, unsnarl and re-thread the twine, restart everything – a good 45 minutes of time wasted. Instead, he left the PTO running, jumped up on the baler and smacked the bale with his foot, hoping to dislodge it. It shot back into the baling chute, knocking him off-balance just as the packing arm whipped around and crushed his leg into the machinery. He managed to disengage the baler to ease the pressure on the packing arm, pulled his mangled leg out of the machinery, crawled into his pickup and made his way back to the house. He spent six weeks in the hospital and endured four operations to put his shattered leg back together. He has suffered leg cramps and tortured, aching muscles ever since. Now nearly 90, he occasionally talks about “the end,” and when he does, he always says, “Well, at least my goddamn leg will stop hurtin’.”