The Darwin Awards
The Darwin Awards honor those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it.
The tree of life is self pruning. -Joel Determan
(Late 1989s, Australia) A rather impressionable student of kung fu listened with rapt attention when his instructor dramatically informed the class, "Now that you have reached this level in your training, you can kill wild animals with your bare hands!"
The martial arts trainee took the statement as gospel, and headed to the Melbourne zoo to test his mettle with the wildest animal of all: the lion. In the dead of night, he slipped into the zoo, leapt into the lion enclosure, and engaged a suitable king of the jungle in combat.
He would probably have lost a one-on-one fight, but he never got to try. His naive fight plan didn't account for the enthusiasm of the lion's pride for a tender intruder; nor did it give sufficient weight to the possibility that his instructor didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Zoo employees found his remains -- two arms and hands -- the following morning, with shreds of red fur grasped tightly in his fingers.
(hey-at least he got in there and tried-right ?)
(12 January 2003, Philippines) Cockfighting is a popular gambling sport in the Philippines. Roosters are aggressive creatures that fight one another in the wild to establish a "pecking order." When their natural arsenals of claws and beaks are supplemented with sharp steel spurs, these feathered animals are transformed into deadly weapons. A trained rooster is an extremely vicious creature.
Usually the fury of an enraged rooster is directed against another rooster in an arena surrounded by avid spectators. But at a recent match in Zamboanga, a cock owner was the target of his own bird. He had just strapped razor-sharp gaffs onto its legs when he lost control of the animal. The bird turned on him, and in "one rapid shuffle," its gaffs sliced through major arteries in his thigh and groin.
Despite routinely handling razor-wielding roosters, the man was not wearing protective clothing. He bled to death en route to the hospital.
(1982, Texas) At the Amarillo Fairgrounds, some buildings were in need of a coat of paint, so local contractors were hired to do the job.
Between the buildings was an angled alley with a culvert in the middle, designed to drain rainwater away from the buildings. Because of the slope, the wheeled painter scaffolding tended to roll downhill, so the painters removed the wheels on the scaffolding. They were in the process of moving the scaffolding next to a building, when the metal structure met a transformer. The painters were killed.
The story made the headlines. The town was abuzz with talk of the tragedy, how it had come to pass, and whether the city was liable for damages. The city officials decided they needed to conduct an investigation.
With much fanfare, they arrived at the scene of the incident, prepared to personally recreate the circumstances. Two officials grabbed the scaffolding in the exact same location as the two painters, began to move the scaffolding... and were promptly electrocuted.
(11 March 2003, Spain) Early one morning, police received a call warning that three robbers had invaded the bar of a Madrid brothel. The police dispatched several units, and confirmed that the call was true. Officers surrounded the building, and used a bullhorn to coax the offenders from the premises.
The robbers, understandably frightened, found themselves in an untenable situation inside a building surrounded by dozens of policemen. Their subsequent actions may have been influenced by the ready availability of alcohol. Instead of surrendering, they decided to go out in a blaze of glory, and tried to escape while shooting at everything in sight.
The policemen ducked, covered, and proceeded to shoot back at the running robbers. Two were fatally injured, and the third was wounded in his right leg.
Why was the gunfight over so quickly? The three robbers were carrying REAL guns loaded with FAKE ammunition. They were firing blanks, making enough sound and light to fool the police into shooting back, but not enough to actually help them escape.
(7 September 1990, Sydney, Australia) Men seem to have an affinity for large trucks. What else can explain the actions of a 34-year-old thief who decided to take possession of the engine of an old Bedford tip-truck?
The truck was parked outside a glass recycling company in Alexandria. It generally takes three men to lift an engine block of this size, but our enterprising pilferer decided that the best way to remove the engine was from below, rather than the conventional out-the-top-with-a-crane technique.
He crawled under the cab and began to loosen the bolts.
Suddenly the engine block broke loose and landed on his face, killing him instantly. Police ascertained that he had at least one accomplice, judging by the pool of vomit found under a nearby bush.
An employee discovered his body early the next morning. The manager said that the truck was about to be scrapped. "If he had come and asked me for it, I would have given it to him."
However, due process was not yet done with Powell.
Thinking himself immune to further consequences, Powell wrote a gloating confession and sent it to the prosecutor's office. "Since the Virginia Supreme Court said that I can't be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on January 29, 1999, to show you how stupid y'all are." He went on to explain in graphic detail exactly what had happened on the night he murdered the girl.
But Powell did not have the last laugh.
He overlooked a catch. The Court had only ruled that there was not enough evidence for the capital murder conviction, leaving open the possibility of a retrial for lesser charges, or for capital murder should new information surface. The second time around, Powell's boastful letter gave the prosecutors precisely the evidence they needed.
Powell's lawyer "portrayed his client as a bright young man." Bright as a burned-out light bulb! Powell was convicted of capital murder on January 15, 2003.
(1997, England) There's ordinary foolishness, and then there's extraordinary foolishness. Stealing fireworks from a storage depot is foolishness. But using a welder's torch to cut through the wall of the building housing the fireworks -- that is extraordinary foolishness.
Several burglars pushed their luck to the brink of failure when they tried to pull off a heist of a building containing a large volume of fireworks. They used a cutting torch to slice through the main door, which was eight feet tall and reinforced with a solid inch of steel. Just as the torch penetrated the door, and success was at hand... a spark landed in a crate of fireworks near the door.
Fireworks are explosive, and this particular crate contained the equivalent of a hundred pounds of gunpowder. The entire factory exploded, and the door was popped from its hinges and slammed flat into the ground.
Astoundingly, the perpetrators were not killed, and have never been found. Flabbergasted pyrotechnics professionals have dubbed them the "Hole in the Ground Gang."
(1998, Texas) I attended a professional diving course at the Ocean Corporation in Houston. At this school, one learns not just standard SCUBA techniques, but also esoteric practices such as saturation diving, underwater welding, decompression procedures, and diving while tethered to a diving bell. The instructors are mostly divers who worked for major oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico.
Diving can be extremely dangerous. Professional diving is second only to a military career for the likelihood of death or injury, despite the presence of safety personnel scouting for safety violations. Even knowledgeable and trained divers can make colossally stupid decisions, and as the following tale illustrates, there isn't always room for a second chance.
First, start with a hook. Not just any old hook, but a large hook attached to an oil rig crane. These cranes are used to lift items heavy items off cargo ship decks. Normally, a crane is equipped with a safety hook with a metal latch that secures the hooked item. Safety hooks are necessary when working offshore, as even light seas can bounce items right off the hook. Very dangerous, particularly to whatever lies beneath the falling mass.
The absence of a safety hook was the first error.
Second, consider a capped oil well. When an oil rig digs a new hole in an oilfield, oil is not necessarily pumped from the hole right away. Sometimes the well is sealed with a reinforced steel cap. Over time, the oil and the sea floor settle and create a vacuum against the cap. The pressure can be small or large; there's no way to tell in advance. So when a cap is pulled, it's standard procedure to make sure there is no one in the water.
Enter our contestant. He was working on a capped oil well.
His job was to attach the crane hook to the cap, which was approximately one hundred feet deep. Down he goes, hooks the cap, up he comes, and out of the water. Simple enough, but the hook is missing its safety latch.
The crane starts pulling -- and whoops! The hook slides off the cap.
So the diver goes back down and hooks the cap again. It's then that he has a bright idea. Just in case the hook slips again, he decides to stay close by, thirty feet up on an underwater rope ladder.
Not vacating the water was the second error.
The diver tells the topside crew to give it a pull. They tell him to come up. He convinces them that he's perfectly safe, and well away from the cap. The folks topside don't want to waste time arguing, so the crane guy goes for it. This time, the crane pulled the cap off the well.
This particular cap was on a sixteen-inch diameter pipe, sized to move a LOT of fluid VERY quickly. It had been capped and settling for several MONTHS. Oh, and did I mention that the diver didn't even secure himself to the ladder with a safety latch? You guessed it. The suction from the pipe sucked the very surprised diver right off the ladder and into the pipe.
But a diver does not fit into a sixteen-inch pipe.
They figure the pressure sucked in one leg, while the other one stuck straight up. The suction was so powerful that events didn't end with his body wedged in that position. The combined forces of suction and water pressure were sufficient to essentially suck him right out of his suit, from the inside out.
The only item recovered was his steel helmet, which was bigger than the pipe, and his tank of emergency air.
