Tonight I flipped my tractor over on myself. I’m alright, but I’ll be very sore for a while. I’m actually lucky I wasn’t killed - it was completetly upside-down in a ditch. The tow truck driver said “how old is your tractor?”. I said that it was built in '75. He said “the bottom looks brand new!”. I was pinned under it but managed to squirm out. Nothing broken, but I’ll be bruised from head to toe tomorrow. Three people had to stop to tell me about friends or family members who’d killed themselves flipping tractors.
And yesterday I fould that the skunk smell I’d been smelling in the house for the last four days (I thought a skunk had sprayed under the house) was actually a disconnected propane line in my kitchen. Fortunately because the weather had been so nice I’d been sleeping with the doors and windows open, or who knows if I’d’ve woken up.
I’ve never flipped my tractor, but I did manage to flip my riding lawnmower over on top of myself while I was riding it – luckily the blades were disengaged. I was driving it up the ramp into the back of my truck, not realizing the bottom of the ramp was sitting in a hole. Steeper angle = tractor flips over backwards.
It was not a happy moment when I realized I was pinned under several hundred pounds of lawnmower with the engine running, gas leaking out on my leg, nobody within half a mile of me, no cell service, and no leverage for my arms. Luckily, I managed to get some purchase with my free foot and roll it far enough to get both arms loose. It was pretty easy to get out then, but the whole process seemed to take forever.
I will never again drive a tractor/quad/lawnmower up a ramp onto a truck unless there’s somebody else nearby to help (or get help).
I’m glad to hear you’re ok. If you don’t mind, how did the tractor flip? Did it get stuck, or did it just flip backwards when you were driving out of the ditch?
Ugh, so glad to hear you’re ok after the tractor incident. My best friend’s dad died from a very similar accident. My dad mows my lawn and I have a very steep ditch, and I am utterly afraid the same thing might happen to him sometime. I have to remind him how much it scares me for him to go so near the ditch, and also remind him that I have a very nice trimmer so there’s no need to get that close.
Tractor use is dangerous. I’m so glad you made it through the flip over and the potential gassing.
Here are some incidents with tractors I know of as I’ve grown up.
In the 70’s one of the local farmers flipped a tractor over and killed his self.
My cousin got run over by a tractor’s large rear wheel in a soft muddy field. The mud probably saved him from permanent injury or death.
My grandpa’s second wife the black widow, lost one of her husbands to a lightning strike on a tractor in the field. My grandpa her last husband was the only one that didn’t die an accidental death.
My cousin’s uncle had his scrotum ripped off by a power takeoff on a tractor. He had reconstructive surgery. He had a number of kids later in life.
A couple years ago somebody I knew slightly fell off a tractor and got run over by the running mower behind the tractor. He died by being chopped to death. this one still bothers me when i think of it, but the visualization has been less graphic for a while. Thank God I didn’t see the guy after the accident.
I was hardly on an incline at all, and it didn’t start out all that near the ditch. The front of the tractor strated bouncing, like there was too much impulsion from behind. I tried to get it straightened out, but it kept going nearer to the ditch. I tried to get up on the road, but gravity took over and pulled the tractor 180 degrees. The ditch is probably what saved me, holding th efront and back of the tractor up enough not to crush me and giving me enough room to wiggle out.
There was a big rescue operation by my rescue squad about 2 weeks ago where a guy on a riding mower was hit by a car. The yard tractor was underneath the vehicle, and he went to the trauma center by helicopter.
Probably less painful than being castrated by a PTO, however.
I’m trying to tell myself that a 47-year old woman should be a little more sensible. In the long run it would’ve been easier and cheaper to hire someone to mow my pastures than to buy a tractor and a bushhog and wreck it. Although the tractor might be fixable, and the bushhog looks okay. I’ll admit, this is one horse I’m a little intimidated to climb back on.
I went to an agricultural high school, and had plenty of friends who came from farms. Nearly all of them had a story about someone they knew who had been killed or badly injured by a tractor roll.
Of course, most of them would have loved to drive the brand new tractors with solid canopies, but the economic reality of being a farmer is that a new tractor is often hard to justify as long as the old one still works.
