Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (8 page)

A special track had been built 50 feet back from the throngs, and police were on hand to hold back the crowd. At 5:00 p.m., two trains were set to full speed and aimed at each other. Then the crew abandoned the 35-ton trains in preparation for impact. And, indeed, the trains did smash into each other in spectacular fashion at 45 mph.

What Crush, M-K-T, and the crowd didn’t expect, however, was the collateral damage. The force of the impact erupted the boilers on both trains, triggering massive explosions and hurtling debris into the crowd at high speeds. Photos of the event were taken by a man who was hit in the eye by a flying bolt, for example. Three spectators were instantly killed.

The town of Crush was dismantled within a day; families of victims were given free tickets on the M-K-T Railroad. Crush himself was fired, then rehired by the railway when he convinced his bosses that he could spin the event into a public relations piece about proper railroad safety.

LAMBO, FIELD

In 2008 David Dopp won a brand-new $300,000 Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 in a Utah convenience-store sweepstakes. The first night he had the car, Dopp rounded a curve at 45 mph, hit a patch of black ice, then spun out. The car jumped a curb and crashed through a fence before stopping in a field about 75 feet from the road. The car was nearly totaled. Amount of time Dopp owned the intact Lamborghini: six hours.

G
OBBLED

In 1959 a program was started to aggressively introduce wild turkey populations to California. Officials hoped that having the game birds would mean big revenue from local and out-of-state hunters. It worked: By 1969 there were enough turkeys for a regular hunting season. By the 1980s, there were tens of thousands of them. And so, by 2003 California officials began introducing programs to get rid of wild turkeys, which now numbered in the 250,000 range. Biologists said they were invading habitats of native birds, consuming endangered plants and animals, damaging crops, ruining gardens, fouling backyards—and sometimes even attacking children.

SLIP, SLOP, SLAP, FLOP

After a hole was discovered in the ozone layer above Australia in the early 1980s, the Australian government launched aggressive ad campaigns to warn people about the risks of getting too much sun. (The ozone layer acts as a filter against the dangerous ultraviolet rays in sunlight, and the country already had the highest skin cancer rates in the world.) One of the most popular campaigns was “Slip, Slop, Slap”: “Slip on a shirt, Slop on sunscreen, and Slap on a hat!” National
health associations credited the campaign with making sunscreen use a normal part of life for many Australians, saving countless lives. Then, in 2000, officials announced that nearly 25 percent of Australian adults were deficient in vitamin D. How do you get vitamin D? Primarily by exposure to sunlight—the skin produces it in reaction to the sun’s rays. Lack of the vitamin can cause a host of health risks, including osteoporosis, and is believed to be linked to breast, colon, and prostate cancer.

ORGAN FAILURE

Robin Cook’s novel
Coma
was a pop-culture sensation in the late 1970s. It reached the
New York Times
bestseller list and was among 1977’s top-selling thriller and fiction titles. In 1978 it was adapted into a hit movie (directed by another novelist, Michael Crichton). The plot: a major hospital deliberately puts surgery patients into comas so it can sell their organs for huge sums on a very active black market. The book’s success was felt not only on the book and movie charts, but in real life as well: in the years after
Coma
, organ donation in the United States dropped by 60 percent.

F
or more than two years, John and Penny Adie, organizers of an annual classical-music festival in England, had been working tirelessly to raise enough money to buy a Bösendorfer grand piano for the festival. Valued at £45,000 ($89,000) and made exclusively in Austria, Bösendorfers are the preferred piano of many of the world’s greatest players. “They’re the Stradivarius of the piano world,” said John.

By April 2007, they had finally raised all the money they needed, and they purchased the piano at a London auction. The only thing left to make their dream a reality was to deliver the Bösendorfer to the concert hall. As the delivery workers were hauling “the Stradivarius of the piano world” up the walkway, 20 feet from their destination, they lost control of the dolly…and John and Penny watched in horror as their prized piano fell eight feet off of a ledge and smashed discordantly onto the ground below. “It was a total loss,” said John, noting that insurance would probably cover only half of what the piano was worth. “It’s more than money that is the issue here,” John said. “It was like seeing a priceless painting torn to shreds,” Penny added.

G
o diamondbacks!
To show off to his friends in September 2007, a man in Portland, Oregon, put his pet eastern diamondback rattlesnake’s head into his mouth… and it bit him. He barely survived. “It’s actually kind of my own stupid fault,” he said.

Just keep swimming.
During a summer 2009 flood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a 46-year-old man was standing near a raging culvert of water. Wearing only a pair of shorts, he bet his friends $5 that he could swim across the culvert. No one took the bet. He jumped in anyway. His body was found five days later, a mile and a half away.

Hand, gun.
In 2009 a Falmouth, Massachusetts, man bragged to a friend that if the friend shot a BB gun at him from across the room he’d catch the pellet with his hand. The friend obliged. Good news: The man actually did snatch the BB out of the air with his hand. Bad news: The BB ended up lodged in his hand. He later explained to police at the hospital that the whole incident was just an “accident gone wrong.”