Several months ago, a woman using a powered wheelchair in the local college library (the computer room, where I am now) got a sudden surprise when she squeezed in too close the the low wall around the central booth (for the attendants)–and the pressure popped a tire off her wheelchair with a loud bang, startling everyone present but, fortunately, injuring nobody. 
(She later managed to get home and to have the wheel repaired.)
Post here a freak accident you witnessed–the more startling or strange, and the less incidence of physical injury the better. 
Well, I didn’t witness this one in the flesh (thank god), but it happened to a guy I work with. He’s a tech for the phone company I work for, and he was driving one of the utility vans on the expressway, going to his next appointment. There was apparently a piece of debris (a remnant of metal pipe) in the road, and a car in front of him hit it and flung it back towards my friend’s van. It shot right through the windshield like a spear and impaled the passenger seat. Through and through. Two feet to the left and my friend would have been impaled instead. Creepy.
This happened to the parents of a woman I work with. During a storm, a tree fell on their house. A large branch came through the bedroom roof and impaled the bed right between them while they were sleeping…!
Then there was the time Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy lost control of his car and ran into Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese twins . . .
One time? at band camp? this kid? choked on his retainer? Well he didn’t really choke? He just gagged?
I saw this one dude with pierced nipples (musta been perm-erects)and a chain that went from his ear to his two nipples. Anyway, this other dude with a spiked mohawk was riding a skateboard near him. As skateboard dude tried to grind the curb, he slipped and the skateboard smacked the back of this lady with a well manicured beard and mustache. She fell and reached out, grabbing the chain linking the guys two nips.
Talk about your “Freak Accident”!! :D:D
One freak accident was–well, no accident at all.
Many years ago, a friend of mine from high school–I’ll call her Vickie–was traveling with her husband to Hawaii on their own boat. The boat got caught in a typhoon! The two of them were white with terror at one point. But they eventually went to bed that night, and in the morning woke up to a calm sea and cloudless sky. But they also saw a huge log, much like a telephone pole (don’t ask me how that got into the open sea!) floating nearby. If it had shown up during the typhoon they might have been floating…
Trust me (I’m a lawyer) this story is true…
A judge I know presided over the following damages case…
Mr A, a local goverment employee, is working in a hole in the ground. He is digging the hole to get to an disused junction box or something. There is a funny smell which Mr. A puts down to the fact that he is in a hole in the ground, and it’s a little damp. He is wrong. The smell is gas. There are gas pipes in the ground which, although they no longer lead anywhere, are still connected to the mains supply. Due to settlement in the earth, some of the pipes have cracked, and are leaking gas. There is an underground system in the street with manholes for access, and under the manhole covers, where the system enlarges, the gas has mixed with air into a dangerous concoction.
Our hero, Mr. A is unaware of all this, and continues digging until he reaches his appointed goal - the junction box. The smell is still there, but Mr. A is not harmed by that.
He finishes, gets out the hole, and shouts to Mr. B to take over. Mr. B does, and Mr. A walks along the road back towards the work truck.
Mr. B leaps into the hole - and lights up an oxy-acetylene torch…
There is, not surprisingly, an explosion, and Mr. B is blown into the air. He lands on the road, uninjured.
Startled by the noise, Mr. A stops and turns to see Mr. B land. Unfortunately, Mr. A has stopped on a manhole cover, and the gas is burning merrily along towards him. It reaches the manhole cover and the mixture of air and gas ignites blowing the manhole cover, and Mr. A with it, into the air - much higher than Mr. B.
Mr. A is still not injured. He lands, half in and half out of the manhole.
He is still uninjured.
However, when the falling manhole cover hits him, it breaks one of his legs and both his arms.
The judge kept having to leave the bench to laugh.
An injury occurred with this one, but since it happened to me and I can laugh at it, I guess it’s OK.
I give you…
Friend of mine moved into a new place yesterday.
Last night we had the house warming.
Today the place very nearly burnt down.
Go fig.
Eve, once again I am humbled and in awe of your rapier like wit, reinforcing my vote for you as fav SDMB poster.
If you were a man, I’d ask you to marry me.
Once I was driving through Charlotte, NC at rush hour (about 25-30MPH). I never heard a crash or anything, but happened to glance over and see a tire, just a tire go rolling past me. All I could think of was “That’s odd!”
OK, here’s one of my own:
I had just moved to Korea a few months earlier. The apartment I had been assigned was recently vacated by another teacher, who had returned to the US. In the apartment was a small refigerator/freezer, about 4 feet tall. The freezer part was completly filled with ice, due to the previous tenant’s negligence…
For months, I thought about defrosting the freezer so that I could put some ice-cream in it, but did nothing.
One night I came home after a party with some students, drunk as hell… I open the frige, to get something to drink, and notice the ice-filled freezer. ‘Dammit! I’m gonna do something about that NOW!’ I thought.
Being drunk and tired, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time getting the ice out of the freezer, so I pondered this for a moment, and decided the best way to do it would be to pour boiling water into the freezer and melt the ice out. OK, I put a pot of water on the stove to heat up, and emptied out the frige. I turned the frige on its back, and proceeded to pour pot after pot of boiling water on the block of ice…
The ice melted away slowly, but did so in such a fashion as to leave a VERY sharp edge on the top. When enough had melted away, I reached in, grabbed the block of ice, and attempted to pull it out. This resulted in a large, deep gash at the base of my thumb! Blood flew everywhere, and I ran to the bathroom to get control of the situation… once the bleeding was under control, I cleaned up a bit, wrapped my thumb and went to bed (I didn’t feel like going to the hospital at that hour of night…).
The next morning I got up, taught my first few classes with a huge wad of paper towels around my thumb, and then walked to the hospital. Now, at this time I did not speak any Korean beyond a few words I had learned for self-preservation. I get to the hospital, was greeted at the door by a man who said something in Korean that I didn’t understand, but interpreted to be an inquiry as to what I wanted. I showed him my thumb, and he escorted me into a surgery room. A nurse came, washed, nay, scrubbed the laceration with a toothbrush and distilled water, and told me (in broken English) to wait. After a while, a doctor came in. He looked at the cut, began to prepare to sew it up, and said (again, in broken English), “How do?” (IE: “what dumb-ass stunt were you trying to pull, and what actually cut your thumb?”)
Now I was screwed! I said, in English, “Dude! I was trying to de-frost my freezer by pouring hot water in, and it melted into a sharp point, and when I tried to pull the ice out, it cut me!” I could see by the expression on his face that he caught none of that…, but I, with a little medical training, realised that he needed to know how I had cut myself (tendonitis injection? antibiotic injection? etc…). So I tried in the Korean that I actually knew at the time: “Mool… ACHU chupta! Mool!” (Water… VERY cold! Water!). He didn’t understand (understandably), and called over a collegue… I tried again… and again… eventually, I had about 5 doctors and 15 or 20 nurses around me while I tried to explain how I had cut myself!!
They finally gave up, gave me 7 stitches on my thumb, a couple of shots, and sent me on my way…
Igo! As the Koreans say…
BTW: when I got home, I looked up the word “ice” in a Korean dictionary… one of the definitions was “ah-ee-suh” or ice with a Korean pronunciation!! :rolleyes:
You know those highway signs that say “Caution, Falling Rocks”? And you know how you always say, feh, so what am I suppose to do about it? Well I was driving up highway 1 in Baja, and there’s these “Pelligro!” signs with a graphic of a big falling rock. Just as I was saying “Feh…” I rounded a curve and this boulder the size of a hippopotomus bounced accross the highway about 3 feet from us. Feh, indeed. No injuries.
Then there was the time I slipped on a wet ladder and the pointy end of a tube of caulk went up my nose. I drove myself to the ER to get it cauterized, and looked like I’d been in a bar fight for about two weeks.
Back when boyfriend and I were just friends he told me this one…
He sitting on girlfriends lap (he smaller - therefor he on lap) - kissing. They fall off the chair.
yey!
Him Tarzan. Her Jane.
tries to make Tarzan sound and fails
I just read your toilet story, so shut up. 
I am too tired to write more than one full sentence…
dodgy
A friend of mine was driving on a remote highway at night when he drove smack into a diesel engine that was laying in the middle of the road. WTF? Apparently it had fallen off the back of a scrapyard truck. Won’t tell more as he may post the entire story himself one day.
Someone told me their father once decided to drive his pickup truck at high speed “through” a large cardboard box that happened to be on the highway, only to discover too late that the box contained a washing machine. A Darwin Awards candidate, I think.
IIRC this year they had a manhole blow up in DC. A student was riding his bike over it at the time, and was thrown like 10’ in the air. (superficial burns only, so it can be funny).
Can you picture riding your bike in the street and getting catapulted thru the air?While in the Army, one of the mechanics was working on a Hummvee and the oil coller fan started up while his hand was on it. Good sized gash right on his palm. I go grab the first aid kit. The only thing even remotely like cotton wadding (to stop the bleeding) is a couple of kotex pads. I went ahead and applied one and taped up his hand. Bleeding stops. I then run him over to the base hospital. The nedic that is going to look at it takes a scalpel (to cut the tape) and slices my friends hand WIDE open. It took 37 stitches to repair everything.
A friend told me about her 19 year old son who claimed he was using a knife to cut the duct tape that was holding his girlfriend to the bed when it slipped and sliced his eye in two. But I have an very hard time believing that story.
I have very thick toenails (I have to cut them with metal shears), little toes that curl under at a 90 degree angle, practically no feeling of pain in my toes, and very weird blood that makes me bleed excessively. Once my little toenail pierced the toe next to it. By the time I felt any pain, and realized I was in deep trouble, the toenail had grown through a blood vessel. When I pulled it out of the toe, blood started going everywhere. Fortunately, it stopped after about 15 minutes. I never could have explained that one to E/R personnel.