* * *
READER COMMENT:
“I guess he ate his words.”
* * *
DARWIN AWARD: WORKIN’ AT THE CAR WASH
Confirmed by Darwin
29 JANUARY 2003, BRAZIL
At work, Manoel was responsible for cleaning out the storage tanks of gasoline tanker trucks. He had been employed in that capacity for two months when he ran afoul of fuel.
The thirty-five-year-old began to fill a tanker with water, a standard safety procedure that forces flammable vapor out of the container. He returned an hour later to check whether the water level was high enough to proceed. But he had trouble deciding, because it was so DARK inside the tanker.
A resourceful employee, Manoel forgot the very reason he was filling the tank with water when he lit a cigarette lighter to shed some light on the situation. His little test successfully determined that the water level was not yet high enough for safety. The vapor explosion launched him through the air, and he landed in the company parking lot a hundred meters away.
Manoel suffered severe burns, blunt force trauma, and an injury to the head that exposed his unused brain, proving that he had one. Our witless car washer had learned his terminal lesson in safety by the time the firemen arrived.
Reference: O Estado de São Paolo, Folha de São Paolo
* * *
An aerospace engineering student comments, “I have a sound understanding of physics. This story says that the unfortunate victim flew one hundred meters, but people less than a mile from a nuclear bomb detonation rarely are thrown more than a hundred meters, and that’s an explosion more than ten thousand times as powerful! I’m also a firefighter, and know that liquid fuel explosions don’t have much mass and rarely throw a body far.”
* * *
DARWIN AWARD: ROCKETING TO GLORY
Confirmed by Darwin
7 FEBRUARY 2005, KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA
Fireworks are a longstanding Lunar New Year’s tradition among Malaysia’s large Chinese minority, and they continue to be widely used to celebrate despite a ban on their sales and use.
Wan, a twenty-nine-year-old excavator operator, spent the evening watching people set off fireworks outside a suburban nightclub. These were no mere firecrackers. They were rockets that shot as high as a ten-story building before exploding.
His curiosity piqued, Wan bent over one of the launching tubes for a closer look, wondering how these powerful rockets worked. He was peering down the tube when it fired, sending him flying ten meters. He died instantly from severe head injuries, according to a senior police official.
Reference: The Star, AP
DARWIN AWARD: THE ARMY’S A BLAST
Confirmed by Darwin
6 MAY 2004, UKRAINE
Piling up live artillery is grueling work, so it makes perfect sense that a group of soldiers would take a cigarette break at lunchtime. The warehouse was filled with ninety-two thousand tons of ammunition—until the soldiers lit up their ciggies and inhaled deeply, ignoring warnings that smoking can cause cancer. They flicked the butts away and went back to work. The glowing embers of the tobacco butts acted like slow fuses, which started a small fire that nobody noticed until it ignited a chain reaction of massive explosions.
The explosions lasted for a week, tossing debris as far as twenty-five miles away, destroying buildings in a two-mile radius, and forcing the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents. Red-hot shrapnel set off additional fires in nearby towns and ruptured a minor gas pipeline. Total damage from the smoke break was estimated at $750 million.
Miraculously, only one of the soldiers at the arsenal died in the disaster.
Reference: Reuters, AP, Novosti
* * *
News accounts report five people killed by explosions, but only two were smokers. The nomination would be disqualified if innocent bystanders were injured—and an AP article said four died from “health problems aggravated by the stress of the disaster.” Novosti, the Russian press agency, said six soldiers were charged with causing the fire, rather than two, and the only direct death was a guard at the facility. It’s not clear if the guard was also smoking, or if the other four deaths were caused by the explosions or simply ill health. Therefore, I am tentatively calling this a Darwin Award, despite minor misgivings.
* * *
DARWIN AWARD: HUMAN TORCH
Confirmed by Darwin
23 NOVEMBER 2002, OSLO, NORWAY
Around 4:45 P.M., neighbors reported hearing a loud pop followed by a fire at a rail yard in Filipstad, just outside Oslo. Fearing a potential terrorist attack, fire and police crews rushed to the scene. The top of an electric train was burning! When the fire died down, investigators pieced together its cause.
The spray cans and wet paint on the side of the train were the first clues. Inner-city Norwegian youth, victims of a society polite to its core, were lashing out in desperation at the brutal cleanliness and order of a country where the trains always run on time, and they had decided to stick it to The Man by tagging the symbol of their oppression. So desperate were they to make their political point that they walked right past several signs warning of the danger of high voltage and climbed over fences to reach their objective.
One of them, a seventeen-year-old, wanted to tag where no man had tagged before—on the roof of the train. The fact that few people would ever see his art was no impediment to this brave young man as he sought to subvert the dominant paradigm. He climbed atop the train, sprayed his creation, and rose up to proclaim his accomplishment—touching the main power line and lighting up the neighborhood as fifteen thousand volts coursed through his body. His remains were so badly burned that authorities were initially unable to determine that the victim was human.
Reference: Dagbladet, Aftenpost
DARWIN AWARD: LAVA LAMP
Confirmed by Darwin
30 NOVEMBER 2004, WASHINGTON
Twenty-four-year-old Philip was found dead in the bedroom of his trailer home, with the burnt remains of a Lava Lamp strewn over his kitchen. Puzzled investigators eventually pieced together a likely scenario for Philip’s last moments.
Lava Lamps are a mesmerizing distraction. Philip couldn’t wait to fire up his new Lava Lamp. He plugged it in and waited for the pretty globs to begin their surreal dance. But after several frustrating minutes, nothing happened. Then a bright idea hit him: “Why not accelerate this painfully slow process?” He took the lamp to the kitchen, placed it on the stove, and turned up the heat.
In short order, the wax melted and began its sinuous dance. But the liquid was designed to be warmed by a forty-watt bulb, not gas flames. It was overheated. Entranced by the display, Philip forgot that “heat expands.” Whereas there was no room for expansion in the glass bottle, the Lava Lamp resorted to a violent explosion to relieve the pressure.*
One thick shard of glass blew straight through Philip’s chest and into his heart. Philip stumbled into his bedroom, perhaps uttering “Aeternum vale!” (Latin for “Farewell forever!”) as he collapsed and died.
Police found no evidence of alcohol or drug use, so it is safely presumed that Philip was in full possession of his senses when he went out with a bang.
Reference: Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
* * *
The secret of the Lava Lamp is simple: A light bulb heats a bottle of colored wax and liquid. The wax is denser than the liquid at room temperature, and sits at the bottom. As the wax warms, it expands and rises in an undulating blob. At the top, where the bottle is cooler, the cooling wax becomes denser and begins to sink. The random, undulating effect is mesmerizing.
* * *
DARWIN AWARD: AMATEUR BOMB INSPECTOR
Confirmed by Darwin
25 MAY 2004, AMBON, INDONESIA
Curiosity may have killed this cat,
but no amount of satisfaction can bring him back.
The city of Ambon was on edge. Just two days before, a bomb hidden in a cookie tin, disgui
sed with two bottles of beer and some peanuts, had exploded and wounded five people. So police took extra precautions when a worried man alerted them to a suspicious black plastic bag that had been hung on the handle of his motorbike while it was parked outside an open market.
The police cleared the area, moved the bag to the middle of the street, and waited for the bomb squad to arrive. Alarmingly, this bag also contained a cookie tin. The police set up a safety cordon twenty meters away from the bag and warned people to stay back. But after twenty-five minutes spent waiting for the bomb squad, curiosity got the best of Willem, a forty-five-year-old fish vendor, and a number of other onlookers. They wanted to get a closer look to see what else was in the bag. What could happen?
What, indeed. As they approached the bomb, it exploded, killing Willem and injuring sixteen others, all of whom receive Honorable Mentions.
Reference: The Australian, Jakarta Post, Catholic World News, Taipei Times, Asia News, Christian Today
HONORABLE MENTION: FIREWALLS
Confirmed by Darwin
1997, ENGLAND
There’s ordinary foolishness, and then there’s extraordinary foolishness. Stealing fireworks from a storage depot is foolishness. But using a welder’s torch to cut through the wall of the building housing the fireworks—that is extraordinary foolishness.
Several burglars pushed their luck to the brink of failure when they tried to pull off a heist of a building containing a large volume of fireworks. They used a gas cutting torch to slice through the main door. The door was eight feet tall, concrete, and reinforced with a solid inch of steel. Just as the torch penetrated the door, and success was at hand…a spark landed in a crate of fireworks inside.
Fireworks are explosive, and this particular crate contained the equivalent of a hundred pounds of gunpowder. The entire factory exploded. The door was popped from its hinges and slammed flat into the ground. The roof lifted off and landed in one piece. Interestingly, despite the violence of the explosion, the debris was confined within the factory perimeter.
Astoundingly, the perpetrators were not killed, and have never been found. Their cutting equipment remained behind, along with their car, which had been flattened by the concrete roof. Flabbergasted pyrotechnics professionals have dubbed them the “Hole in the Ground Gang.”
Reference: the Pyrotechnics Mailing List
HONORABLE MENTION: WELDING WARNING
Confirmed by Darwin
1 JANUARY 2004, SINGAPORE
If you ever find yourself with a leaking fuel tank on your motorbike, be sure to heed this lesson from a thirty-nine-year-old man from the Bukit Panjang neighborhood. He removed the leaky tank from the bike and carried it to his sixth-floor flat, where he drained the gasoline into a pail in his toilet. Considering what happened next, it was fortunate that nobody else was in the flat, and that nobody was standing on manhole covers a block away.
He lit a propane torch, planning to solder the hole in the tank. Unfortunately, gasoline that had spilled on his hand caught fire. Frantically trying to extinguish the flames by plunging his hand into the toilet, he ignited the gasoline fumes coming from the pail. The toilet was engulfed in a ball of fire, and the explosion “shook the block.” Smoke poured out of the bathroom window.
That was just the beginning. Some of the burning gasoline spilled down a floor drain and into the sewer system, where it mingled with sewer gas and set off a massive underground explosion. Startled residents watched in amazement as one manhole cover was “blown to pieces” and two others popped open. People fled their homes, fearing disaster.
The man survived all of this chaos with minor burns on his left hand, for which he refused treatment.
I’m Jumping Jack Flash—Rolling Stones
Reference: Channel NewsAsia, Singapore Straits Times
HONORABLE MENTION: CROTCH ROCKET
Confirmed by Darwin
28 MARCH 2004, JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA
Jeremiah, thirty-five, had a fun idea for a prank: shoot a six-inch fireworks rocket at his girlfriend as he drove by in his Ford Mustang. But before he could launch it out the window, the fuse burned down to the ignition point, and the rocket began to ricochet around the inside of his car, finally exploding between his legs. The flash temporarily blinded him, which protected him from seeing the extent of the damage.
Neighbors saw the flash and heard the explosion. They rushed toward the car to find a person on fire! They extinguished the flames to reveal a man singed from his groin to his toes, with an outline of his sandals burned onto his feet.
“I thought I was dead,” Jeremiah told a reporter. “I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t walk.” He was taken to a medical center and treated for second-degree burns. When interviewed by a reporter, he reflected on his potentially fatal encounter with rockets, raised his hairless eyebrows, and said, “No more of those!”
Reference: WJXT-TV, Florida Times-Union, AP
HONORABLE MENTION: HOT PANTS
Confirmed by Darwin
30 JULY 2004, GEORGIA
Gustav, thirty-nine, was hard at work in his laboratory when uninvited guests knocked on the door. Because his work was rather secret, he poured two of the chemicals, red phosphorus and iodine, into an empty film cannister and stuffed it in his pocket before going out to greet his visitors. They were two social workers bearing forms, and Gustav walked them out to their car, sat in the back seat, and began writing.
“He kept fiddling with his front right pants pocket,” said the commander of the drug task force. The film cannister was probably feeling warm as the red phosphorus and iodine began to react. These chemicals are key ingredients in the making of methamphetamine. What Gustav apparently did not know was that the now-boiling mixture of red phosphorus and iodine would soon reach 278 degrees Fahrenheit.
“All of a sudden, a loud bang happened, and fire shot from his pocket. It damaged the inside of the state vehicle.” Gustav suffered second-and third-degree burns to his testicles and leg. He was rushed to a medical center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before being hauled off to jail. Sheriff’s deputies raided the house and discovered his meth lab. He was charged with the manufacture and possession of illegal drugs.
“That was one for the books,” said a Walker County sheriff’s spokesperson. “I’ve been in this business for more than thirty-five years, and that’s a first.”
Reference: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, foxnews.com
HONORABLE MENTION: EXPLODING BOAT
Confirmed by Darwin
11 APRIL 2004, POMPANO BEACH, FLORIDA
Bill, forty-four, and Ted, forty-seven, narrowly avoided earning a double Darwin when they accidentally blew up their fishing boat. They had stopped at a gas station to fill up the boat’s gas tank. Unfortunately, they put the nozzle into one of the fishing-rod holders instead of the gas tank, sending fuel throughout the boat. With gasoline sloshing around in the bilge and forming a vapor cloud, the two men drove merrily on, looking forward to a great day of fishing.
They launched the boat, which floated quietly in the calm water—until they pushed the starter on the engine. The spark from the engine instantly ignited the vapor cloud surrounding the men. The force of the blast knocked them both to the deck. The twenty-six-foot boat was engulfed in flames and destroyed, along with part of the nearby dock. Firefighters spent ten minutes trying to control the blaze.
Bill was treated and released from the emergency room. Ted was transferred to the burn unit and released the next day. “It certainly was a horrible lesson to learn about boating,” said the Pompano Beach Fire-Rescue spokesperson.
Reference: wftv.com, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, St. Petersburg Times
HONORABLE MENTION: EXPLODING OUTHOUSE
Confirmed by Darwin
13 JULY 2004, BLACKSVILLE, WEST VIRGINIA
A man decided to light up a cigarette while relaxing in a portable outhouse, inadvertently demonstrating one more reason to give up the habit. According to a spokeswoman f
or Monongalia Emergency Medical Services, the methane in the Porta-Potty “didn’t take too kindly” to the lit cigarette, and expressed its displeasure by exploding in a fireball.
The man, whose identity was withheld “due to privacy policies,” was able to drive himself to a nearby health center. Emergency workers declined to reveal whether the man’s injuries (although not “life-threatening”) were serious enough to remove him from the gene pool.
Reference: Dominion Post
HONORABLE MENTION: FLAMING BUNGEE JUMP
Confirmed by Darwin
17 JANUARY 2004, BRISTOL, ENGLAND
The Clifton Suspension Bridge, soaring two hundred fifty feet above the seven-hundred-foot-wide Avon Gorge, has attracted people with something to prove ever since it was finished. In 1885 Sarah Ann Henley threw herself from the bridge after an argument with a boyfriend, but was saved by her parachute-like dress and cushiony crinoline petticoats. In 1957, a flying officer of the RAF successfully flew a Vampire jet under the bridge at four hundred fifty miles per hour. He briefly celebrated before he and his jet disintegrated on the cliffs on the south side.
The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design Page 13
