Yeah. It rather amazes me the way some people have been punctured in just the “right” way to not kill them outright. Phineas Gage with the tamping rod, there was a construction worker in San Jose CA in the 80’s who fell off a scaffolding and had a piece of re-bar go in just behind his chin and come out through an eye socket, etc…
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It does happen surprisingly often.
Blunt objects at relatively low speeds not infrequently push organs aside. I’ve received a guy in an Emergency Department who’d drunkenly fallen from an upstairs window and was found hanging from the iron piling fence outside, suspended from one shoulder; and another who’d driven through a tall picket fence and been impaled with a single post through his thigh and pelvis from below, after it had come through the floor of the car. Neither of them had damaged anything major, though they did receive life changing injuries.
It’s probably not an effect worth betting your life on though …
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Ascertainment bias. The ones that got hit the “wrong” way are just dead.
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Wouldn’t ascertainment bias assume I was making a statement about statistical significance instead of just a comment that: “gee that’s neat”?
(Thanks for playing / Don’t be an asshole.)
ETA: That was a poorly worded response. I’m tired and I’ve had a long day. Let me rephrase that.
I don’t know why you would jump to the conclusion that I was somehow viewing an error in statistical data, when I wasn’t claiming any statistical significance in the first place. (Or even viewing my examples as data points.)
Maybe you were making a joke? If so, I suppose I didn’t really get it.
If 4chan had become a news channel, this is what I’d expect to find…
And then there’s this guy [graphic and disturbing] who was not so lucky. Somehow the wrought iron fence he fell onto both decapitated him and left his head stuck neatly atop it, presumably as a warning to others.
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I once worked with a press brake operator who had allowed the unpowered ram to come down on the back of his hand, breaking several bones.
The guy was fast and accurate, but regrettably stupid.
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He must have fallen much further than my guy. I’d give you a “Like”, but it feels so wrong …
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Damned splinters. Years ago I knew a guy who was renovating an old church. He nearly died from a splinter from the 150+ year old oak door.
The splinter was 15 inches long and embedded in his wrist up to his elbow… He lost the arm due to multiple infections.
Sorry, no pix. (No, not sorry.)
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As someone who installed floors for many years…I think it’s difficult to say whose fault this is without getting more information.
After reading the article, it sounds like a board was sticking up that broke off when the player made contact. Gym floors are almost always floating these days, which means they aren’t actually anchored onto the concrete below them, even though that is an option. As a school system, I doubt they paid extra to get that done.
A wood floor is an organic product, and as such, you’re possibly going to find abnormalities, after 15 years, with high use. It just depends. Was there a huge water spill that caused a lot of moisture damage? What quality of wood did the school spring for?
Wood floors are also an engineered tongue and groove product, and it’s possible that the tongue part of the offending board broke or splintered over time, allowing the board to pop up, especially if it received water damage. There would have been no way for an installer to do a “better job” to prevent things like this, as they probably didn’t choose the product that went down.
That being said, there are a couple of ways this could have been installer error, at least that I can think of. The first is if they forced a very warped board into it’s neighboring groove. This seems unlikely, as it’s more work, and it’s almost always easier jut to get a new board. The second is if they intentionally put a board in place that had a broken or otherwise defective tongue. Again, however, this is only going to make installation a lot harder. Doing either of things is an almost sure-fire way to get you back into the gym, very soon, to do “free” warranty repair work, so no installer in their right mind would do so. These types of installer errors tend to make a lot of popping, creaking, and loose boards, so they’re easy to spot. I find it hard to believe that a high use floor wouldn’t have had every square inch exposed to installer errors in a very short period of time.
Sometimes you get a customer that “got a deal” and bought product where every third board seems to have problems like the above, and you’re asked to install it anyway. In situations like this, it was standard practice for us to make the customer sign a wavier nullifying us from warranty requirements.
Or, as the article states, this could have just been a freak of nature. Again, wood is organic, and organics are unpredictable. There are other flooring options if you don’t want to deal with the curveballs that natural wood can throw you. The board could have just…broke.
Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that a board sticking up or being loose, in such a high use area, wasn’t a known problem before the accident. This makes it seem like the board simply spontaneously broke, popped up, and inured the player, probably from the vibration of the players at the time on the court. If so, yeah, you’re really going to have a hard time finding someone to pin the blame on.
A manufacturer can’t be responsible for the natural qualities of wood, so long as it came out of the mill with no noticeable problems, the installer apparently did their job, and so on. Bizarre.
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Yeah i wasn’t saying that installer error was DEFINITELY what happened here, but i didn’t actually know how old the floor was. At 15 years, you are likely right… that doesn’t seem… “relatively new” to me. My comment was more just about the fact that if this was not a freak of nature checking other work done by this company to make sure it doesn’t have the same problems would probably be a good idea to stop more injuries from occurring. I wasn’t even saying they should solely place the blame on said company.
Had this girl recently missed a flight that later crashed? Cause this is right in line with some of those “FInal Destination” accidents.
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The primary rule of running away: don’t lose your head.
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Poor kid!
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Just an observation that we probably only hear about/comment on the folks who make it. Lots of people get impaled by objects everyday and die or end severely injured (in car crashes, falls, construction accidents etc). These exceptional events, although possibly common, are likely rare in the grand spectrum of people getting impaled by large objects. I did not assume that you were making an argument about statistical significance. No need to be defensive - I was simply observing that things like this should not be so surprising in a population of >7 billion people.
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Thanks. Sorry for the impulsive response. I was a little ratcheted up yesterday evening, and probably should have just stayed offline.
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A similar accident happened in Brazil some years ago, unfortunately with a different outcome.
Yep. Nope. I have been the unhappy recipient of a compound fracture of my femur. One side benefit of a full face motorcycle helmet is the inability to look down at yourself whilst lying on your back on the pavement.
WARNING - STOP READING NOW
It was bad enough that I was lying there with some annoying thing lying on my chest. When I pushed it off, I realized it was my foot.
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Oh god, that’s horrible!
Also, DO NOT WANT!!!
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