The one I really regret was in 1972. 13 year old Boyo Jim had talked his parents into letting him go, alone using public transportation, to a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley. This was from the south suburbs to the North side, so just convincing them was a feat in itself. It was cold and windy and rainy, and I was not properly dressed for it. I made it all the way into the field well before the game, and sat there being cold and wet and miserable. And then I started shivering, non-stop. I decided I couldn’t take it, and I got up and got back onto the El and headed for home, before the game even started. My mom thought it was a very mature decision. :dubious: It was also the game Burt Hooton threw his no hitter against the Phillies.
There were three other events I was just as well not being an eyewitness to. I was only about 4 blocks away trudging through a blizzard (or what passed for one in DC) when the Air Florida plane hit the 14th Street Bridge and went down in the Potomac. Didn’t see or hear a thing, only knew when I got home and turned on the TV and saw the coverage, and realized how close I was to it.
The other two were also in DC, with weird parallels. Each time I was on a city bus passing a construction site, within moments or minutes of a major collapse of the structure in which workers were killed. One of them was an above ground steel frame building, and I noticed that the frame look odd and bent, and found out later that part of it had collapsed just a few minutes before the bus passed it. The other was much closer to the incident in time – within moments. I had passed this place daily for weeks, and I knew they were doing a large excavation, presumably to put in an underground floor or parking lot for a new downtown office building. Anyway, I saw a huge cloud of dust boil up and a bunch of workers running out of the site. It turn out the dirt walls of the excavation had collapsed, not being sufficiently shored up, and at least one worker was buried and killed.
I was about 100 miles north of Mt. St. Helens when it erupted. I slept right through it. There were smaller eruptions for weeks afterwards, and I did see one of them from about that distance.
When I lived in Seattle, there were at least two earthquakes that I completely didn’t notice.
I was on the bike path today, and there were two women riding toward me. They were at a road crossing and coming around the barricades that stop cars from coming in. I looked away for a second, looked back, and one of them was on the ground. A very slippery corner, I guess. (Not the sort of big event you were probably asking about, but it did happen just today, and the timing on it was just oddly perfect.)
My daughter, 7 years old at the time, went over the old I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis twice on the day it collapsed. She was in a YMCA summer program and it was field trip day, so they took the kids to a water park or something (I don’t remember exactly where, now) on the south side of the metro area that day. Fortunately, they always had the kids back by about 4 p.m. The bridge collapsed at about 6 p.m.
Another school bus from a different summer kids’ program was doing a similar field trip and was trapped on the bridge as it fell.
I seem to have an interesting habit of not witnessing car accidents, but showing up about 10 seconds afterwards and basically being ‘first on the scene’ so to speak. I guess it’s good since I tend to be pretty cool under pressure and if you couple that with missing all the excitement, I’m usually the one who (on several occasions) goes and turns off the cars while I’m on the phone with 911 and tries to figure out what the hell is going on.
My, um, ‘favorite’ (for lack of a better word, and that’s a really bad word) is when my dad and I were driving home from somewhere down a nice long stretch of road. Two motorcycles pass us. We were going 35, they couldn’t have been going more then 40 or so. A few minutes later we come around a bend in the road I still remember saying to my dad “Hey, there’s those two bikers. What, are they having a picnic (they were sitting on the grass)? I wonder why they laid their bikes down…oh my god, they crashed”. Once we got closer we could see what happened. It wasn’t good. One guy was fine. He just hopped off his bike fast and put it down. The other guy came around the bend and, well, the road turned and he didn’t. He clipped a sign. He was about 25 feet away from his bike, his boots were still on the pedals. His leg was bent, um, well it wasn’t where it should be. I got to watch Flight For Life land about 50 feet away from me.
Turns out they were two off duty bike cops. The fork on his bike locked up, I guess HD had a recall out on it or recalled it later or something, but it wasn’t his fault. He had to have his leg amputated. My dad saw him in the newspaper a few years later, something about fraud.
Last December I was driving to work when several police cars converged at an intersection where I was making a right turn. I saw a couple policemen running through the yard across the street. As I drove on, several more police cars flew by me headed in that direction. When I got to work, I found out that a policewoman had been killed and her partner wounded while serving a warrant. One of the suspects had been killed and the other wounded. The thing is, I was running about 5 minutes late that day. If I had been on time, I would have been there just as it happened. Of course, I have no idea if I would have recognized gunfire or noticed that anything was amiss. But it was a weird feeling knowing I had just missed it.
I almost got to seethis, a pretty freak accident. I was literally picking between two different routes to get home, and I picked the other way instead of taking I-45. Otherwise I would have been stuck in traffic for hours, but I might have been able to catch a glimpse of that weird, weird wreck! I head the description on the radio and it just didn’t make any sense to me. I was like “wait what??? A semi’s trailer stuck on an overpass freeway sign??? how in the world…” and then saw pictures online! It was crazy.
I was a metro train driver in Oslo on 22.juli 2011, but that date happened to fall on my off-weekend. If I had been at work, I would have been driving through town when the bomb went off, and would have been part of the evacuation effort. I’m really happy I wasn’t.
I would have been perfectly safe either way, this isn’t one of those “I was almost a victim!” stories. Just something I’m glad I missed.
Seth MacFarlane was almost on one of the planes that crashed on 9/11. He was late and missed his flight because his assistant screwed up telling him the wrong time, or something like that.
My 3 kids were on American Airlines flight 11, Boston to San Francisco, the day before 9/11. I picked them up at SFO when they landed. Like Mohamed Atta, my kids’ flights originated from Portland, ME. Just one day before.
I was even closer when St. Helens erupted. I don’t remember it, not because I slept through it, but because I was only a year or so old.
The biggest earthquake that happened in Portland that I remember was when I was about 14. It was nicknamed “The Spring Break Quake.” It woke up my entire family, but I slept through it.
Mine was also in DC, like the OP’s. I was on the Metro red line four years ago at the moment that two other red line trains crashed into each other, killing 9. My train wasn’t close to the wreck, maybe 10 stations away.
A couple weeks ago I went to a concert to see the very first opening band but they started to play before I got in. Once I got in they didn’t play anything I knew: fortunately I could sort of hear them before I got in and I didn’t recognize the two songs they played while I was waiting in line.
There were also two songs that I predicted might be a part of the “warm up music” that plays at concerts between sets at that concert, because they are popular songs by a similar band that was not playing at that concert. In between sets, I went to the bathroom and came back to hear that it was in the middle of one of the two songs. Score one: I successfully predicted the warm up music! But I also missed my favorite part of the song.
I was in FL for a wedding, pre-GPS days & rental car didn’t have a map. The only way I knew how to get from where I was to where I needed to be was via the hotel, which was out of the way (like driving two sides of a triangle). I pulled into FD to get directions & was talking to one of the firemen when I heard/saw something over his shoulder. There’s a big black ‘cloud’ in the sky & then we see something falling from it. We’re WTFing, trying to figure out what it is when I say, “That’s a fuselage, we’re looking at a mid-air plane crash.” He didn’t believe me!
I thought it might be RC planes in the next field since it wasn’t that loud & it’s sort of hard to tell distance in 3 dimensions without any reference point so he goes back to giving me directions.
10 seconds later, tones drop & they’re dispatched - to a (fatal) plane crash! Two private planes had a mid-air on an otherwise clear day. I didn’t see them approach, but I did see them separate.
In PGH, PA for a race, one of the guys we were with saw a car NOT make the turn on I-376 when you come thru the tunnel & over the river into downtown. Over the guardrail, smacked the embankment & slid trunk first into the water. It was deep enough & dark enough that you could only see two white circles (the headlights} as the car ended up vertical underwater.
Feb. 26, 1993. I was to meet my brother at 12:30 at his office, in a building just across Liberty St. from the World Trade Center. I must have been 4 or 5 blocks away, around Broadway and Chambers St. at 12:18 when the bomb went off. Not knowing anything I walked down Fulton St., alongside St. Paul’s Church to get to plaza. There was a fire truck trying to go down the street, but the traffic was bumper to bumper. When it did get to Church St. (east side of the plaza) it turned left (south) which was surprising as a fire truck was slowly making its way north on Church St. and they passed each other in opposite directions. It turned out they were responding to alarms from two different locations on the plaza.
The only thing I could see amiss was some (not much) smoke coming from a mid-level window (maybe 25th floor) of the south building. I met my brother and we stood outside waiting for my wife and daughter (predictably late from shopping) and we had lunch. The only thing any of us noticed, besides the smoke, was a steady stream of people exiting the buildings, but AFAIK that was normal lunch-time foot traffic. I found out about the bombing only later that day.
I tried, but failed, to imagine what lower Manhattan would have been like had the tower fallen. I pictured it lying horizontal across 1000 feet of lower Manhattan. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have fallen straight, but cracked in the middle.
Like some of us above, I slept through a natural disaster. When I was about six or seven, we lived in the complex housing married students for Ohio State in Columbus, where my dad was in grad school. One night there were big rainstorms that produced flooding in the area in the middle of the night. My parents thought it would be cool to show me the parking lot filling with water as the nearby creek came out of its banks, but apparently I was dead to the world. They couldn’t wake me up, so I missed it.
It wasn’t that big of a flood, but the story has entered family lore because earlier during the night, my dad had gotten worried about possible flooding in the basement storage areas, where our (and every) family had an assigned unit. When he got there several other people were there with the same concern. (They were all correct- the basement flooded to five feet deep.) This really big guy helped my dad carry up some boxes containing our Christmas ornaments and some other precious items, thus saving them from the impending flood. Turned out the big guy was John Hicks, two-time All-American offensive tackle for the Buckeyes and runner-up that year for the Heisman trophy. (Still the best-ever Heisman finish by an offensive lineman.)
So, I actually almost but not quite witnessed a flood and an awesome football player saving keepsakes from my early childhood.
Not a newsworthy event but a situation where I had a near miss. I was moving into an apartment complex. I was originally supposed to be moving into a vacant second floor apartment. But then the manager said that somebody who was already living in the complex wanted a second floor apartment. So they moved into the available second floor apartment and I ended up in the first floor apartment they moved out of.
A year later there was a fire in the complex. It started in the first floor apartment right below the apartment I would have been living in. Nobody was killed but both apartments were completely destroyed.
Not very close, but we had dinner at Windows on the World, flew home the next day, and I was still recovering from jet lag and trip exhaustion when Mrs. B. called me from her commute and said I really needed to turn on the TV.