Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Biggest Screw-up You Personally Seen Where You Work ?

Cubi Point Naval Air Station, a P-3 was taking off for routine patrol, seconds after getting airborn and over Subic Bay all four engines flamed out and down she went. Someone had filled the coolant tanks for the turbines with dry cleaning fluid instead of alcohol. (Both were stored in identical OD green 55 gallon drums, right next to each other. Whoever filled the tanks on the P-3 didn't read too well if at all.) Of the twelve or thirteen aboard, only one fatality, an ensign who was sitting on a pedestal seat over a fuel cell got crushed into the overhead when the plane came down on the water. I shot a lot of pictures of the crash, the wreckage and, during the follow-up investigation, the fluids storage area.

My stories involve mostly inmates hurting themselves or one another.

One guy broke apart a disposable razor and castrated himself over a toilet. One of the bloodiest messes I've ever seen.

A mental health inmate, housed in a padded room with no access to anything that could hurt him managed to come up with a single staple, the kind for stapling a few pages of paper together. He straightened it and used it to go up and down his left arm. He was flicking pieces of meat from his arm at us as we entered the cell and his arm looked like it had been through a shredder.

Another ding with multiple personality disorder began pummeling himself about the head and shoulder. By the time we got him stopped he was black and blue from his shoulders to the top of his head. The mental health clinician joked that the guy had one personality that all the other personalities hated and they ganged up and kicked the crap out of him.

Those are just three that stick out from a long list of assaults and self inflicted injuries from a career in corrections. Glad to be out of that world.

Don't know if it was the biggest, but this one was notable.

I worked as a waterways patrolman for a pay fishing lake in Ohio. I was stopped on a bridge checking fishing permits when a semi hauling rolled steel coils came down off the hill and went off the side of the bridge. Had the lake been high, he'd have drowned, because he got pinned in the cab. He was still lucky to survive, as the stell coils are popped loose when the truck rolled and the coils broke their packaging bands and were uncoiling all over around the truck. Turned out the driver blew a 1.9 when they drug tested him for alcohol. If the truck had come to my side of the bridge I'd have been killed.

Only saw one death that I can remember at work. Working summers during college at local dept. store a woman went to the shoe dept, found a steel counter she considered just right and beat her face against the corner hard enough to cave her face in..... By the time I got there she was done and on the floor. Tried to keep her alive, but she expired just as the EMTs arrived.
Helluva way to kill yourself.

Holy crap!

She had some demons alright.

Had an inmate do a similar stunt. Dove off a second floor tier, head first into the edge of a steel table. Pushed the top half of his head back 2 inches. If they want to kill themselves, they'll find a way.

They promoted my boss.

I find it remarkable that someone can physically do something like that. I imagine it must have taken more than one attempt do the kind of damage necessary to cause death, hard to imagine how someone could go through with it. Not only that, but to come up with that method, of all the possible ways it could be done, is just bizarre.

It truly shocked me the first time I saw an inmate slam his own head into something. I was a farm boy/cowboy, hayseed, hick would had never been exposed to the underbelly of humanity. This kid slammed his forehead into a small, thick plexiglas window so hard it cracked the pane. It stunned him enough we were able to gain quick control of him and got him four pointed. He had a heck of a goose egg the next day. Nothing shocks me anymore. That's kind of sad really.

Had a distraught PFC threaten to kill himself once.
We got called by his wife.
He had a boot lace tied around his neck with the ends in his hands.
When we got there he gave us the " one more step" routine to which...I stepped and he yanked the knot.
Tight.
Turned red, then passed out cold#
I rolled him over, cut the lace with my spyderco and cuffed him up.

bad memories

Had guy remove the guard off the meat tenderizer/cube steak machine like this:



Yep you guessed it, sucked his hand right in, fellow working right next to him managed to pull the plug from the wall at about mid-palm, he and machine went to Emergency as one!
Nasty

Remember this one?

Scrotum Self-Repair
1991 At-Risk Survivor
Confirmed True by Darwin

One morning I was called to the emergency room by the head ER nurse. She directed me to a patient who had refused to describe his problem other then to say that he "needed a doctor who took care of men's troubles." The patient, about 40, was pale, febrile, and obviously uncomfortable, and had little to say as he gingerly opened his trousers to expose a bit of angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.
After I asked the nurse to leave us, the patient permitted me to remove his trousers, shorts, and two or three yards of foul-smelling, stained gauze wrapped about his scrotum, which was swollen to twice the size of a grapefruit and extremely tender. A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and blood, extended down the left scrotum.

Amid the matted hair, edematous skin, and various exudates, I saw some half-buried dark linear objects and asked the patient what they were. Several days earlier, he replied, he had injured himself in the machine shop where he worked, and had closed the laceration himself with a heavy-duty stapling gun. The dark objects were one-inch staples of the type used in putting up wallboard.

We x-rayed the patients scrotum to locate the staples; admitting him to the hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, a broad-spectrum antibacterial therapy, and hexachlorophene sitz baths prior to surgery the next morning.

The procedure consisted of exploration and debridement of the left side of the scrotal pouch. Eight rusty staples were retrieved, and the skin edges were trimmed and freshened. The left testis had been avulsed and was missing. The stump of the spermatic cord was recovered at the inguinal canal, debrided, and the vessels ligated properly, though not much of a hematoma was present. Through-and through Penrose drains were sutured loosely in site, and the skin was loosely closed.

Convalescence was uneventful, and before his release from the hospital less then a week later, the patient confided the rest of his story to me.

An unmarried loner, he usually didn't leave the machine shop at lunchtime with his co-workers. Finding himself alone, he had begun the regular practice of masturbating by holding his penis against the canvas drive-belt of a large floor-based piece of running machinery. One day, as he approached orgasm, he lost his concentration and leaned too close to the belt. When his scrotum suddenly became caught between the pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into the air and landed a few feet away. Unaware that he had lost his left testis, and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the wound closed and resumed work.

I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification.

By Dr. William A. Morton, Jr. MD, a retired urologist residing in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

You want bizarre, a friend of mine got called to investigate a suicide, the guy taped the switch on a circular saw clamped it in the vise and threw his neck down on it, Bud said it was a hellofva mess. Still bothers him sometimes.

Great story theee, HB, but what does being unmarried have to do with it?

Moral: Dont fugg with machinery.

Big time truth.

For item not with blood and bad memories.

Operator failed to follow procedure and mixed hydrogen and air in a turbine generator at the same time. For you not in the know, this is a bad thing and makes for a BIG boom. Stunning to see five hundred pound pieces of metal laying hundred of yards away. Was coming in to work on an outage. Got a bigger job.

Talking about really big pieces of equipment.

A miracle though, no one killed. Millions in damages.

A dumb bastid crashed one of my ag planes because he had his head up his arse about 8 foot!!

I was working in the rear of an MD-80 aircraft during a heavy check. There were two characters working in the tail cone. In an MD-80 when the aft stairs are up, the stairs make a walkway into the tail cone. Normally, during maintenance, you deactivate the tail cone slide and raft. These two brainiacs "forgot" and one of them stepped on the cable that triggered the raft. I heard a bunch of yelling and one fella ran by me heading for the nose of the aircraft. The other guy was floundering around under the inflated raft and slide (which has completed filled the tail cone area). I headed down the walk way and about the time I got there, I heard the raft POP. The mechanic under the raft had kicked around enough to get to his knife and slice the raft open. Expensive mistake, but nothing bruised save for egos.