'Lucky' Escapes!

[Whiskers]

Had a lucky escape this evening. But I've said before I don't belive in Luck. Well the gods must have been shining on me, but I think I'm agnostic. Well, I guess I'll have to figure out the why's and what-have-yous later.

Anyway, I reckon I just used up my second life. This evening I drove into some water on the road where it often sits over the edges of the road when it rains heavy only a couple of km from home ... and my little ute scewed off into the drain like in slow motion and casually stopped in the deepest part of the drain and flopped onto the drivers side in close to a meter of water. It's a big flat cane growing area with wide flat drains where the water just sits because it can't run away fast enough.

The scary bit was that it was dark and I landed under water with my seatbelt on, to which I promptly released the belt buckle and got above water, then opened the passenger window and got out on top.

In hindsight I am amazed at what I did next. I got down on the ground again with water up to my thighs and went ****, all my groceries that I just bought are tossed down in the water, so I grabbed hold of the cab and stood it upright again so the seats and tray was out of water to put my groceries on. It is only a small ute but I'd never done that before. Maybe it was because it was in water that it seemed lighter.

Anyway, I was wet as a shag, but unhurt apart from my pride and a passing 4x4 towed me out and home where I'm now counting my blessings.

So, who has had a 'lucky' escape and what do you put it down too.

 

[roland]

I have a few, the most dramatic:

As a young sapling....

Back in the days of trains that didn't have auto doors, sitting on the flloor at the entry with the doors wide open and swinging my legs in an and out of the train with the train speeding along.

On one of my legs in-swing a station platform came whizzing by - 1 second difference in my leg swing would have seen me in a wheel chair or worse at the age of 16

Just luck - I guess

 

[Whiskers]

Roland, so what was the consequences of your experience, ie did it have any profound effect on you or change your behaviour substantially, was someone repremanded for leaving the door open or not supervising etc?

 

[Whiskers]

Well, checking the vehicle and what I did and didn't do, I remembered I had my tyres changed a few days earlier and got one size wider fitted. Checking the vehicle I have found the tyre pressure is 38 psi, about 12 psi higher than I normally run when unloaded.

Given that I had driven the same road in the same conditions many times before without incident, I think it's pretty clear now that the extra tyre pressure and a little extra air in the bigger tyre caused the back wheels which have no weight to speak of on them, to aquaplane when the front wheels hit the ankle deep water on the passenger side causing my ute to skew off the left hand side.

My fault for not checking the trye pressure when I should have to make sure they were on the lower side of normal, to maxamise traction, as I normally do when travelling off road, in sand and wet conditions.

As to the 'luck' aspect, in this case I was conscious all the time. But in two previous car accidents, one where a rear tyre exploded when a teenager on a slight bend and I managed to control the car until it almost stopped, but at the last moment it just slid into an irrigation ditch about five feet deep and my passengers who survived unhurt said I got whip-lashed unconscious going over the edge and hitting my head on the window glass. In this case the irigation ditch was dry, 'luckily'.

Another a decade later, I slowed at a right hand turnoff early in the morning and a car coming the other way with the sun in their eyes hit me head on the front corner causing me to whiplash into the windscreen and unconscious for a few hours with no more than a headache and a broken finger.

I mentioned above that I just used up my second life, but now that I think about it there was still another time when I could easily lost my life. I was about 13 and towing an offsett disc plow. When I stopped for the day to unhitch the plow and drive home I inadvertantly bumped the gearstick into reverse when I was stepping off. The tractor jumped into reverse, I fell and the front wheel pinned my foot. I had to bend myself under the tractor while the front wheel went past causing nothing more than a good gravel-rash. 'Luckily' again I thought at the time, that I didn't bump the gearstick into a forward gear. I later learnt that it was a common problem that this type of tractor slipped into gear so easily.

The reason 'luck' especially in accidents has been on my mind is because my best frend at primary school was killed in a farm tractor accident, again at high school another was also killed in a farm tractor accident. As a teenager I worked beside a cousin a year younger who was killed in what I think was his only significant car accident.

I have had all these 'lucky' escapes from accidents plus a few other relatively minor ones hitting cattle and roos... including one in particular that just comes to mind, I bumped a blackjack wallaby straight off the front wheel of a trail bike on the highway under heavy brakes and just kept on going.

Why have I (and some people) had so many 'lucky' escapes when a lot of my (their) friends didn't?

To borrow the title from another thread, why is it so?

PS: Mods may merge threads if you think they are too similar.

 

[Smurf1976]

1. Always check that your body is not connected to the circuit before you turn the electricity on.

2. When travelling as a car passenger at highway speed, it's a good idea to make sure the driver doesn't go to sleep.

3. If you are going to use petrol to get a fire started, make sure that the fire isn't already smouldering when you add the petrol. A fireball in your face, holes in your clothes and a burning jerry can in your hand isn't much fun (though it sure is exciting...)

All these things happened within a couple of years when I was around 18 and I've been pretty safety conscious ever since. Looking back, I was very, very lucky...

 

[jbocker]

Bloody Hell Whiskers. You reckon you have used up your second life, on my reckoning you must have used up 5 or more. Why are you called "Whiskers"? Nothing to do with a cat with 9 lives is it?

My Lucky escape. I once pinched the last row of chocolate from the fridge, it belonged to the Mrs.
Blood curdling scream could be heard by the whole neighbourhood, but I couldnt help it, I was caught redhanded. Just as well I was fit and strong, damn near killed me.

Glad to read that you survived the ordeal(s) Whiskers. Take Care. I mean it.

 

[Captain G]

When I was 2yrs old my family lived across the road from a golf course - 100m. As a toddler, I was asleep in my cot having a typical afternoon snooze.

When my mother came in to wake me, to her horror she found a large piece of metal about 10cm x 6cm & 1/2 cm thick embedded in my pillow, about 6 inches from my head !!! The amazing thing was I was still fast asleep. In shock she looked around to see where it could of come from, looked at the window and found the glass and the flyscreen smashed.

She couldn't understand how it got there, but once my father got home from work that night, she showed him and immediately he recognized it as being a piece of slasher/ mower blade. He realised that it must of broken off one of their machines while cutting the grass at the golf course.

My father told the owners and the typical response 40 yrs ago was, ooops sorry, and it was left at that.

Well, that's the closest I've been to death.

 

[awg]

3 near drownings, 1 near cliff fall, several electric shocks, a petrol explosion, a power tool incident, several vehicle incidents.

I used to work at a place, where a large roller door used to jam the chain, requiring a 10 metre climb up a ladder to reinstall the chain on the sprocket.

I sometimes had to do that job, and I was very careful, the foreman used to abuse the hell out of me for being so slow. I really hated his guts when he carried on like that. A couple of days after I left that job, he fell off the ladder and was killed

 

[sinner]

How's this one:

Spent a week camping at the base of Mt. Warning in NNSW with some friends.

As per usual in mid-Summer NNSW, it got dark, it started raining heavily and about 3am our campsite got flooded out completely (there were snakes swimming in the ankle deep water and two inch leeches attached to our box of mangos).

Soaked to the bone and our gear soaked even more, we decided to depart the campsite roughly 9am after cleanup and wet breakfast.

On a back road to Murwillimbuh we hit what must have been an oil slick. With five of us in the car, and every spare nook+cranny stuffed with camping/party gear it did not take more than a split second for the back of the car to slide out of control almost careening us windshield first into the edge pylon of a small creek bridge.

Roughly two hours passed as we sat shivering in the absolutely wrecked car with torrential rain still pouring every way. During this time the ambulance came and took one of our friends with a concussion, and local with 4x4+steel cable towed us beyond the road to prevent further accidents and unblock the path. Unfortunately the car was so wrecked the kind local couldn't tow us into town. I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes waiting for the police to arrive and rambling excitedly about how close we all just came to the end. The moment directly after the crash was the absolute worst, as we asked each other if everyone was ok and didn't hear a response from concussed friend.

Eventually another local drove by (this is a relatively remote part of NNSW) and offered to drive us into Mur'bah. We gratefully dove in to the non-soaked non-crushed car and continued smoking every cigarette in sight.

Torrential rain continued to pour.

As we approached the township of Uki, the car cleanly planed on a couple of inches of floodwater off the lane we were in and directly into the path of an incoming 4x4.

The driver managed to stop the car literally a fists distance away from the 4x4 (I got out and checked, to make sure I wasn't dead or something).

I began smoking two cigarettes at once.

The pale-faced driver of the 4x4 rolled down their window and exclaimed "someone must be watching over you lot" before driving off. How little they knew

Eventually made it back to Mur'bah, even wetter and colder than when we left Mt. Warning. Insurance company said they have roughly 10 accidents a year at that spot.

I went and bought a few packs of cigarettes and $100 in lottery tickets. We found our friend sitting at the bar of the local pub dispatched from the hospital under the influence of 15Mg morphine and otherwise fine.

 

[Whiskers]

Bloody Hell Whiskers. You reckon you have used up your second life, on my reckoning you must have used up 5 or more. Why are you called "Whiskers"? Nothing to do with a cat with 9 lives is it?

Well, yes.

My Lucky escape. I once pinched the last row of chocolate from the fridge, it belonged to the Mrs.
Blood curdling scream could be heard by the whole neighbourhood, but I couldnt help it, I was caught redhanded. Just as well I was fit and strong, damn near killed me.

lol, I can relate to that all right.

Saw a part on a documentary on SBS about Adolf Hitler and the assination attempts on him during WWII. He missed two big explosions in two days set to go off while he was in attendance but he left early and claimed he had 'Devine Intervention'.

Apparently he survived dozens of attempts on his life... before he finally took his own life. Maybe the later was the devine intervention!

 

[Boyou]

Gee, Whiskers after seeing the list of near misses...
..you could look at it from the other way and ask why am I so accident prone?

 

[Whiskers]

Gee, Whiskers after seeing the list of near misses...
..you could look at it from the other way and ask why am I so accident prone?

Yes, quite true.

In fact quite a few years ago I got involved in safety management and hence I always try to find the fundamental cause. Some incidents came directly from working too tired and trying to do too much, while others came from trusting others to eg, set correct tyre pressure and/or recommend safe tyre brand for purpose, and not doing enough research/checking myself.

I hadn't had an incident for a long time until recently, so it just goes to show how complacency can set in at any time.

But at the end of the day, I still feel 'blessed' that I have survived many accidents while others had no 'luck' at all.

 

[Smurf1976]

In fact quite a few years ago I got involved in safety management and hence I always try to find the fundamental cause. Some incidents came directly from working too tired and trying to do too much, while others came from trusting others to eg, set correct tyre pressure and/or recommend safe tyre brand for purpose, and not doing enough research/checking myself.

Never, ever trust people where tyres are concerned. It seems relatively simple but it's something that very few people seem able to get right. Bottom line - tyre pressue is about safety and it matters.

Put someone 140m above ground, surround them with 45,000 tonnes of fuel, put 220,000 volts near them etc and they become incredibly careful since the danger is obvious.

But they fail to grasp that in terms of risk to their own life, running tyres seriously under (or over) inflated is a far more likely cause of death than any of those seemingly more hazardous examples.

 

[Sdajii]

I think I've used up about a dozen chances. I've been caught in a rip so dangerous the life guards wouldn't even attempt a rescue, they just stood on the beach and watched me get dragged out. I was a young kid at the time, had never heard of a rip and didn't understand what was going on, but somehow got out of it, got back to shore and was asked by the lifeguards how I managed to get out of the rip, and I said "What's a rip?" I was pretty terrified while in it though.

I've twice been bitten by deadly snakes, requiring treatment without which I would have certainly died.

I've had driving incidents to turn you pale, including skidding across four lanes of traffic, miraculously missing all other cars, and a few others I'll not describe in the interests of staying out of trouble. Actually, the first traffic incident I was involved in was when my mother rolled the car, while pregnant with me.

I've had skydiving incidents, been stuck out on a mountain overnight and almost died of hypothermia... goodness, I can't count the number of near misses I've had. It's only in the last two years or so I seem to have had these things stop happening... touch wood.

Speaking of cats, people say they have nine lives but you only need to run them over once. I thought maybe it was because they'd already used up eight of them, but it works on newborn kittens too.

 

[newbie trader]

Speaking of cats, people say they have nine lives but you only need to run them over once. I thought maybe it was because they'd already used up eight of them, but it works on newborn kittens too.

1 life if you decide youre hungry! :

NT