Story The Darwin Awards

[maniac116]

Resistance is Futile
1999 Darwin Award Winner Unconfirmed by Darwin
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(1999) A US Navy safety publication describes injuries incurred while doing don't's. One page described the fate of a sailor playing with a multimeter in an unauthorized manner. He was curious about the resistance level of the human body. He had a Simpson 260 multimeter, a small unit powered by a 9-volt battery. That may not seem powerful enough to be dangerous… but it can be deadly in the wrong hands.


The sailor took a probe in each hand to measure his bodily resistance from thumb to thumb. But the probes had sharp tips, and in his excitement he pressed his thumbs hard enough against the probes to break the skin. Once the salty conducting fluid known as blood was available, the current from the multimeter travelled right across the sailor's heart, disrupting the electrical regulation of his heartbeat. He died before he could record his Ohms.

The lesson? The Navy issues very few objects which are designed to be stuck into the human body.

August 2000 Dan Wilson elaborates:

I'm a former Navy petty officer, enlisted for six years as an electrician aboard a US Submarine. I got a lot of training. This story was used frequently during my training in the US Navy as an example of what can happen when procedures and safety measures are not followed. I considered the story an urban legend until I found the incident report referenced in the official Navy electrical safety guidelines. I now know it is true.

The actual event is slightly different than described above, and even more deserving of a Darwin award. This sailor stuck the sharpened ends of the probes through his thumbs intentionally. You see, he had just taken a course that taught a critical concept called "internal resistance."

Internal resistance is resistance to electrical power flow that exists inside any power source. It causes the terminal voltage to drop when load (current) increases. You can demonstrate this concept, if you're careful, by monitoring your car battery's terminal voltage, while someone starts up the engine. The reading will be ~13 volts while the engine is off, but during the period where the starter is cranking it will drop to 8-9 volts. The voltage drop is due to the internal resistance of the battery.

This sailor, like all other electricians in training, had already been through a safety class in which one of the excercises is to measure your body's resistance by simply holding the probes between your fingertips. (Most people read 500Kohms to 2Mohms.) Evidently, adding information from the internal resistance class, this sailor wanted to determine his own body's "internal resistance.". So he intentionally pushed the sharpened probe tips through the skin to elimate the rather high skin resistance and get only the "internal resistance". This, of course, caused his death.

How, you might ask, with only a 9V battery? Easy. One of the "rules of thumb" that the Navy teaches is the 1-10-100 rule of current. This rule states that 1mA of current through the human body can be felt, 10mA of current is sufficient to make muscles contract to the point where you cannot let go of a power source, and 100mA is sufficient to stop the heart. Let's look at Ohm's law. Ohm's law (for DC systems - I will not discuss AC here) is written as E=IR, where E is voltage in volts, I is current in Amps, and R is resistance in Ohms.

When we did the experiment in the electrical safety class to determine our body's resistance, we found a resistance of 500K Ohms. Using 9V and 500K Ohms in the equation, we come up with a current of 18 microAmps, below the "feel" threshold of 1mA. However, removing the insulation of skin from our curious sailor here, the resistance through the very good conducting electrolytes of the body is sharply lower. Around 100 ohms, in fact, resulting in a current of 90mA - sufficient to stop our sailor's heart and kill him.

As my electrical safety instructor said, "The reason we now have to teach the electrical safety course to all electricians at least twice per year is because some joe was bright enough to be the one person in the world who could figure out how to kill himself with a 9V battery."

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[maniac116]

Mental Eclipse
1999 Darwin Award Winner Confirmed True by Darwin
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(11 August 1999) A 42-year-old man killed himself watching the eclipse while driving near Kaiserslautern, Germany. A witness driving behind him stated that the man was weaving back and forth as he concentrated on the partially occluded sun, when he suddenly accelerated and hit the bridge pier. He had apparently just donned his solar viewers, which are dark enough to totally obscure everything except the sun.
In Berlin, a 24-year-old victim of the eclipse was hospitalized with severe burns after he climbed a power pylon to get a good view and touched a 20,000-volt electricity cable. A 40-year-old Colombian man killed himself after shooting his wife. His suicide note stated that the August eclipse meant the end of the world. Note that Colombia was thousands of miles away from the path of totality.

Nostradamus foretold, "In the year 1999 and seven months, a large King of Fright will climb down from the sky." August was the seventh month of Nostradamus' calendar. Eclipses can be calculated centuries in advance. The king is a symbol for the sun. Therefore, the "King of Fright" refers to the shadow of the eclipse.

The King of Fright delivered these three men to the King of Death.

 

[maniac116]

"Angry Wheelchair Man"
2010 Darwin Award Winner
Confirmed True by Darwin

DARWIN AWARD WINNER OF THE CENTURY! Angry Wheelchair Man, the rashly rushing rammer who epitomizes the downfall of the human race.

(25 August 2010, Daejon, South Korea) An angry handicapped man, annoyed that an elevator departed without him, thinks it over before ramming his wheelchair into the doors (bam!) once, twice, three times in all. Success and failure combined as he gained access to the elevator, and plunged down the rabbit hole shaft to his death. This 40-year-old man earns immortality as an the most irritated Darwin Award winner to ever walk roll the planet.

 

[maniac116]

"Sauna Kills Monk"
1999 Darwin Award Winner Unconfirmed by Darwin

(26 August 1999, Thailand) An elderly Buddhist monk and three of his followers died from spending hours in a homemade herbal sauna. Five other worshippers remain hospitalized in serious condition. The poorly constructed sauna had been assembled in a basement room in the Bungrasi Buddhist temple near Bangkok.
The group spent two hours collapsing in the sauna before the 88-year-old monk crawled out to ask for help. Victims were rushed to a nearby hospital, where the monk and three women were pronounced dead. "An autopsy indicated that the victims had suffocated in the heat of the room, and died from smoke inhalation," a police spokesperson said.

 

[maniac116]

"Tired of it All"
2000 Darwin Award Winner
Confirmed True by Darwin

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(16 August 1999) Daniel was tired to death - literally -- at the Buckeye Ford Dealership in London. He had sneaked onto the lot in the wee hours of the morning with theft on his mind. His modus operandi was to jack up the back of a pickup truck, remove the wheels, heave them into the bed of a hot-wired Buckeye Ford pickup, and move on to the next target. Daniel possessed what local police referred to as "an extensive criminal background," and had apparently spent years honing his craft. But his expertise failed him this time. The pickup was half full when the 47-year-old thief's next (and final) target slipped off the jack and landed squarely on his chest at 4AM. A clear case of live by the truck, die by the truck.


In a related incident, Police in London, Ohio say a thief was killed while stealing tires from a Ford dealership. Employees found the body of Daniel Nolan, 47, when they arrived for work Monday morning. The jack holding up a truck slipped and crushed him.
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[maniac116]

"A Rocky Roll"
2002 Darwin Award Winner
Confirmed True by Darwin

(29 August 2002, Washington) An innovative petty crime spree turned into a Darwinian opportunity when a Vancouver man fell out of a minivan while throwing rocks. Five men had been denting mailboxes and moving cars with their low-tech missiles, when 23-year-old John decided he needed a wider range of targets, As the Ford Aerostar cruised through a residential neighborhood, he left his compatriots at the windows while he opened the sliding door. One mighty throw later, he pitched through the opening, struck his head on the pavement, and suffered the ultimate penalty for his crime: stone cold death.