A pedestrian was hit by a deer that was hit by a car on Providence Boulevard Thursday evening in Clarksville, Tennessee. At about 5 p.m., a car hit a deer on the road near downtown, according to Clarksville Police spokeswoman Officer Natalie Hall.
“The deer flew off the car and hit a pedestrian,” Hall said.
The pedestrian had broken bones and was taken to Tennova Healthcare for treatment.
“This is not a type of crash that happens often,” Hall said.
By Agence France-Presse
Firemen in Norway came to the rescue Friday of a man who climbed into an outdoor public toilet to retrieve a friend’s cell phone, after he got stuck in the tank.
Cato Berntsen Larsen, 20, was able to climb through the toilet seat opening to recover the phone lying at the bottom of the outhouse, but was unable to climb back out again.
“First we tried to get the phone with a stick but that didn’t work. So I jumped in,” he told daily VG.
“I was down there an hour, I was panicking,” he said, adding there were “animals” crawling on his body.
Overcome by nausea and vomiting, he tried in vain to pull himself of the tank, and which is only emptied once a year, according to VG.
He ultimately decided to contact the fire brigade to help end his ordeal in the small town of Drammen outside Oslo.
“It was a fairly easy task for us. We sent a four-man crew with a chainsaw and they cut open the front of the (plastic) toilet,” fire brigade spokeswoman Tina Brock told AFP NEWS agency.
The rescue was a “first” for the local fire brigade, she acknowledged. “It was pretty full down there.”
The phone was not recovered.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/26/man-rescued-from-inside-public-lavatory/
Two men in their early 20s fell an estimated 50 to 90 feet down a cliff in Encinitas, California, on Wednesday afternoon while playing “Pokémon Go,” San Diego County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Rich Eaton said. The men sustained injuries, although the extent is not clear.
Pokémon Go is a free-to-play app that gets users up and moving in the real world to capture fictional “pocket monsters” known as Pokémon. The goal is to capture as many of the more than hundred species of animated Pokémon as you can.
Apparently it wasn’t enough that the app warns users to stay aware of surroundings or that signs posted on a fence near the cliff said “No Trespassing” and “Do Not Cross.” When firefighters arrived at the scene, one of the men was at the bottom of the cliff while the other was three-quarters of the way down and had to be hoisted up, Eaton said.
Both men were transported to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. They were not charged with trespassing.
Eaton encourages players to be careful. “It’s not worth life or limb,” he said
In parts of San Diego County, there are warning signs for gamers not to play while driving. San Diego Gas and Electric tweeted a warning to stay away from electric lines and substations when catching Pokémon.
This is the latest among many unexpected situations gamers have found themselves in, despite the game being released just more than a week ago. In one case, armed robbers lured lone players of the wildly popular augmented reality game to isolated locations. In another case, the game led a teen to discover a dead body.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/15/health/pokemon-go-players-fall-down-cliff/index.html
Over the past nine months, deaths have been reported from being electrocuted, falling from bridges, and running with bulls—all while attempting to capture an outrageous selfie. Now, following the most recent news of a Japanese tourist who fell to his death after trying to pose for a picture at the Taj Mahal’s Royal Gate in India, media website Mashable investigated just how many accidents like this have taken place over the last year, and compared that to the number of shark-related deaths.
Their findings: since the beginning of the year, 12 people have died while attempting to take selfies, while only eight people died following a shark attack. Mashable also pointed out that only four of the selfie fatalities occurred from falling; others died after being struck by trains, for example, and a Texas teenager recently died from accidentally shooting himself while posing for a selfie with a gun.
Back in January, two men were killed in Russia after posing for a selfie with a hand grenade, according to Al Jazeera, prompting the Russian police to launch a “safe selfie” campaign. And other tourist attractions—including Disneyland!—have banned selfies or selfie-sticks entirely, citing safety concerns. Selfie-related injuries and deaths even has its own Wikipedia page.
http://news.health.com/2015/09/24/selfie-shark-attack-deaths-mashable/
Maya Donnelly awoke to what sounded like thunder in the early morning hours, but dismissed it as a typical monsoon storm and went back to sleep. Later that morning, she looked in the carport at her home in Nogales, near the US-Mexico border, and saw pieces of wood on the ground.
She found a bulky bundle wrapped in black plastic. Inside was roughly 26lbs of marijuana – a package that authorities say was worth $10,000 and was likely dropped there accidentally by a drug smuggler’s aircraft.
Police are now trying to determine whether the bundle was transported by an aircraft or a pilotless drone. Such runs usually occur at night.
“It’s all right on top of our dog’s house,” Donnelly said of the incident, which occurred on 8 September and was first reported by the Nogales International newspaper. “It just made a perfectly round hole through our carport.”
Living near the border, Donnelly said she assumed the object contained drugs. She immediately called her husband, Bill, who told her to call 911. The couple said officers who responded told them an ultralight aircraft smuggling marijuana from Mexico had probably let part of its load go early by accident before dropping the rest farther north, the newspaper reported.
Nogales police chief Derek Arnson said it was the first time in his three-year tenure that he had seen a load of drugs hit a building.
“Someone definitely made a mistake, and who knows what the outcome of that mistake might be for them,” Arnson said.
Maya Donnelly said she thought it unlikely someone would come looking for the drugs, which are now in police custody. Arnson agreed but said police had boosted patrols in the neighbourhood.
The family will have to pay the estimated $500 in repairs, as well as pay for a new home for their German Shepherd, Hulk. But the scenario could have been much worse for the couple and their three teenage daughters.
“Where it landed was clear on the other side of the house from the bedrooms,” Maya Donnelly said. “We were lucky in that sense.”
Friends and family also have gotten a laugh. Several joked that the couple could have profited from the surprise package.
“That’s what everybody says: ‘Why did you call 911?”’ Maya Donnelly said. “But how can you have a clear conscience, right? We could have made lots of home repairs with that.”
By Ashley Fantz, CNN
A Kentucky pastor who starred in a reality show about snake-handling in church has died — of a snakebite.
Jamie Coots died Saturday evening after refusing to be treated, Middleborough police said.
On “Snake Salvation,” the ardent Pentecostal believer said that he believed that a passage in the Bible suggests poisonous snakebites will not harm believers as long as they are anointed by God. The practice is illegal in most states, but still goes on, primarily in the rural South.
Coots was a third-generation “serpent handler” and aspired to one day pass the practice and his church, Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name, on to his adult son, Little Cody.
The National Geographic show featured Coots and cast handling all kinds of poisonous snakes — copperheads, rattlers, cottonmouths. The channel’s website shows a picture of Coots, goateed, wearing a fedora. “Even after losing half of his finger to a snake bite and seeing others die from bites during services,” Coots “still believes he must take up serpents and follow the Holiness faith,” the website says.
In February 2013, Coots was given one year of probation for having crossed into Tennessee with venomous snakes. He was previously arrested in 2008 for keeping 74 snakes in his home, according to National Geographic. Tennessee banned snake handling in 1947 after five people were bitten in churches over two years’ time, the channel says on the show site.
On one episode, Coots, who collected snakes, is shown trying to wrest a Western diamondback out of its nook under a rock deep in East Texas. He’s wearing a cowboy hat and a T-shirt that says “The answer to Y2K – JESUS.”
The pastor is helped by his son and a couple of church members.
“He’ll give up, just sooner or later,” one of the members says. “Just be careful. Ease him out.”
The group bags two snakes, which a disappointed Coots says hardly justifies the trip to Texas.
“Catching two snakes the first day, ‘course we’d hoped for more,” Coots says in the video. “We knew that the next day we was gonna have to try to hunt harder and hope for more snakes.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/us/snake-salvation-pastor-bite/index.html?c=homepage-t
Thanks to Pete Cuomo for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.
A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.
The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.
Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city – putting millions of lives at risk.
Though there has been persistent speculation about how narrow the Goldsboro escape was, the US government has repeatedly publicly denied that its nuclear arsenal has ever put Americans’ lives in jeopardy through safety flaws. But in the newly-published document, a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons concludes that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe”.
Writing eight years after the accident, Parker F Jones found that the bombs that dropped over North Carolina, just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president, were inadequate in their safety controls and that the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst. “It would have been bad news – in spades,” he wrote.
Jones dryly entitled his secret report “Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb” – a quip on Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical film about nuclear holocaust, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy’s Road.
Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. “The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52,” Jones concludes.
The document was uncovered by Schlosser as part of his research into his new book on the nuclear arms race, Command and Control. Using freedom of information, he discovered that at least 700 “significant” accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between 1950 and 1968 alone.
“The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy,” he said. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here’s one that very nearly did.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.
A western Montana man floating on an inner tube suffered broken bones in his legs and torn ligaments in his knees when another man jumped from a bridge and landed in his lap.
Andy Hill of Missoula and his wife were floating under a bridge on the Clark Fork River near East Missoula Sunday when the man landed on him.
“Suddenly I had intense pain and was under water,” Hill said.
“There was a guy on my lap and he rolled off my lap and he just kept apologizing saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,'” Hill said.
The man swam Hill to shore, still on the inner tube, and the man’s friend helped Hill as well.
Hill suffered broken bones in both lower legs and a cracked femur in his left leg and will likely spend the rest of the summer in a wheelchair or on crutches.
But he’s been able to keep his sense of humor.
“Who does this happen to?” asked Hill, laughing. “I don’t know of anybody this has ever happened to.”
Missoula County authorities say the man who jumped could be charged.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/24/3518428/mont-man-injured-when-bridge-jumper.html#storylink=cpy
Boeing is investigating how a piece of a military aircraft fell off and crashed in a Texas backyard, authorities told ABC News.
Nate Martinez and his girlfriend Melissa Gutierrez were sitting in their San Antonio home Thursday morning when they heard a loud noise outside, they told ABC affiliate station KSAT.
“I looked outside,” said Martinez. “I kind of looked all the way around and I was surprised to see an aircraft part there. It was a little surprising.”
The grey, cone-shaped aircraft part “was obviously part of a military aircraft that had somehow fallen onto their back patio area,” a spokesperson for the San Antonio Police Department told ABC News.
“This is unsusual, very unusual,” Peter Field, an aviation consultant who specializes in military aircraft accidents, told ABC News.
Field identified the piece as an aft ray dome, a rear piece of a Boeing C-17 cargo plane, which is currently in service in the United States Air Force.
“I’m amazed that this happened. It is not common for the military to lose any part of an airplane like this.”
Field believes the aft ray dome fell while the aircraft was in-flight.
“I would bet you that the crew didn’t even know that it had come off because this part of the plane is all the way in the back. They would not have felt a thing,” he said.
According to San Antonio police nobody was hurt by the fallen aircraft part and there was no major property damage.
Still, Martinez and Gutierrez are concerned for their children’s safety.
“It’s very scary…It could have [hurt our children],” Gutierrez said. “That’s what we are worried about. We’re out here a lot barbecuing and it landed on our barbecue pit.”
A spokesperson for Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, an Air Force Base near Martinez’s home, could not comment on the incident and directed ABC News to Peter Pedraza, a spokesman for the Boeing Company.
“Boeing is investigating the cause of an in-flight incident…Our highest priority is the safety and well being of those in the community and the passengers and crewmembers who fly aboard Boeing airplanes. We will continue to share information as the investigation progresses,” Pedraza said.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/military-aircraft-part-falls-texas-backyard/story?id=19781023
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