Hmm, this could be an interesting thread…. “fertile ground” comes to mind.
INCIDENT NUMBER 1
I shot about 3-1/4" of a 3-1/2" ring shank nail into my hand several years ago. I was working with a nail gun framing up a wall (while mad at my wife for something long since forgotten, but still a bad combination). Building a wall on the ground before standing it up, holding a stud in my left hand while using the nail gun to try to force a warped plate up against the bottom of the stud. I missed the fact that the nail gun was half on - half off of the bottom plate and shot the nail right over the side of the plate an into my hand.
My wife heard me cussing 500' away...
Did you know that Vise-grip makes surgical instruments? It's true - the surgeon who pulled the nail out of my hand had the coolest pair of stainless steel vise grips. I tried to get him to give them to me since I had "paid" for them, but unfortunately they autoclave them and reuse them.
Even with the morphine, I felt every ring on that ring shank nail as it was pulled out.
INCIDENT NUMBER 2
Probably my worst incident was three years ago, when I needed to move a Bobcat loader that a fencing crew had left on my farm. It was blocking a gate and I only needed to move it 10', and the crew told me to go ahead and do it.
I've run a variety of equipment in my time, including skid steers, so no big deal, right? Wrong. Turns out that the fencing crew had bypassed almost all of the safeties on the loader, including removing the lap belt. Basically the controls were worn out too. When I went to move it, it got into a "bouncing" situation where it bucked from front end in the air to rear end in the air. After 3 or 4 bucks - each time getting worse, I was thrown upward out of seat the top of my head hit the top of the cab. I didn't pass out - but why is still a question...
Nope, I didn't go to a Doc - figured that the body would heal itself. Wrong.
As time progressed, my neck started hurting. In a year it got so bad that I only had about 30 degrees of pain free motion. I researched chiropractors, and went to one in Apex who had trained on a process called "Atlas orthogonal alignment", or something like that. He took x-rays and conducted a thorough exam. His treatment program took three months, but by the end I had regained full motion and the pain was gone. That was over a year ago.
The only thing remaining today of the incident is the fact that I lost over 2 inches of my height from the impact. I used to be slightly over 6' tall, and have been for 30 years. Now I'm 5' 10-1/2". I regained about 3/4" from the chiropractic therapy.
INCIDENT NUMBER 3 (AND I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST!)
Oh – wait a minute… I just remembered the absolute WORST situation that I found myself in. Didn’t get hurt though… do near misses count???
Back in 1990 I was in-between jobs, having just finished up closing down an unprofitable Radio Tower service company that a couple of real estate developers owned, and had a few weeks of time to kill before starting my next job.
I took on a project for a TV station out of Wilmington, NC. They had a 2000’ broadcast TV tower located in White Lake, NC, and most of the lighting system had been destroyed during a recent ice storm. My task was to rebuild the lighting system, replacing conduit and wiring as needed. Fortunately most of the damage was in the lower portion of the tower, caused by ice melting and falling off of the upper portions of the tower. It took me about a week to replace the damaged conduit and lights on the bottom 1400 ft of tower, working by myself. After I finished the job, the station engineer asked me to replace the bulbs in the tower at their downtown Wilmington studio.
You’ve seen the old RKO motion pictures with the radio tower logo at the beginning, right? Well that’s what this tower looked like. It was ancient, having been built in the 1930’s, and all that the station was using it for was to beam their broadcast signal from their studio over to the big tower in White lake. As I recall it was around 300’ tall.
The bottom portion of the tower was a great big self supporter that necked down to a 30” face for the top 60’. On my way up the tower (wearing a backpack with the large, expensive bulbs in it), at around the 250’ level I noticed that one of the tubular legs on the tower was totally rusted through! The only thing supporting it was the diagonal members that were attached from it to the adjoining legs. It still looked fairly solid, so I continued my ascent. Another 20’ up the tower and I saw that a DIFFERENT LEG was also totally rusted through! Oh boy, talk about controlling my adrenalin. When I reached the top of the tower, there was a steel plate attached across the top that overhung the face of the tower by around 14” all the way around. On top of this plate was the upper tower beacon light, a fixture about 16” in diameter and 40” tall, or thereabouts. The only way to access it was to reach up and over the plate, and pull myself on top. Because of the overhang and amount of flexibility needed, there was no way that I could have a safety line attached to the tower while undergoing this maneuver. Once up and over the plate, I had to sit on top of this trianglular plate (it was around 48" across), with my legs spread wide and the beacon in-between them, with nothing to strap off to. Where I was sitting, one of the tower tubular legs protruded an inch or two through the plate, and the other tower legs protruded by my calves.
After gingerly opening up the beacon assembly and replacing the lamps, I radioed down to the station engineer to turn the lights on so that I could test them. As soon as he threw the switch a loud hum stated emanating from the ballast in the beacon, and only one of the two bulbs lit up. At the same time as the beacon started humming, I heard another, different type of hum coming from between my legs… a stream of hornets started flying up and out of the tubular leg!
Flashing through my head I could see myself taking a fatal flight to the ground if I panicked. I froze just about every part of my body and called the station engineer on the radio telling him to turn the lights off IMMEDIATELY! I recall speaking through gritted teeth, as the hornets were swarming around my head and the top of the tower.
Apparently the humming coming from the ballast on that beacon light really woke up the hornets. I sat on top of that tower trying not to move a muscle for around 10 minutes, until the last hornet disappeared back down that hole. I then very gingerly closed up the beacon and re-latched it, and very slowly shifted my body around and over that plate and back onto the face of the tower.
When I got back on the ground the station engineer took one look at me as said that I was as white as a sheet and asked what the heck had happened.
Would you believe that I did not get one sting, but man was my heart pumping for quite a while after that incident. Sitting at my desk today reliving it still sends shivers down my spine.
