How John swapped steel plates

John was working for a utility company. One day they were burying a cable, and needed to temporarily cover an excavated pit. To cover they used what you might have seen and probably driven over - a large steel plate. John was a foreman at the site, and told his backhoe operator to start lowering the plate into place.

Except John was a diligent foreman. He liked to do things perfectly. He wanted to be sure that the steel plate would sit well over the outline of the excavation, not wobble, and not crumble asphalt and rock onto the half-finished cable interface. Just as the plate was being lowered, he decided to sneak one last peek under the plate. Except the backhoe operator was not so experienced at fine controlling the lowering function, and lowered the plate by too jerky of a motion, which squashed John the Foreman's skull. As John recollected, after almost a year in a wheel chair, and partial memory loss, the split second he felt the weight of the plate was like the worst headache, except being inside his skull bones. John is 80% normal now. He cannot drive, concentrate, remember complicated information, and has a high-tech, combination stainless steel-titanium plate replacing most of his skull dome. The upshot of it, he has not needed any psychological counseling. He doesn't remember the details of his stupid decision to regret the whole episode.

120 AC to 12 DC, an RV, a lamp chord and a child

This warning sign is unintentionally appropriate to this case. Since I am an investigator, I usually have no idea what an insurance company is hoping to find out when they ask me to look into a case. My job was to check over the location and have the law enforcement that was involved in the investigation to corroborate the circumstances of the accident. I have posted minor details of this case on forums, but here I am providing the account in its entirety. A man takes his family to a Winnebago camping site. After long winter, the engine was a bit hard to start and that caused the battery to go weak. He arrives at the site, hooks up his Winnebago to the site's utilities, and remembers to charge up the battery. Except he is totally ignorant of electrical basics. As he recounted to a sheriff's deputy, he believed that he could charge the battery (12 DC) from the power company outlet (120 AC), because someone told him that "AC and DC don't matter" since "the difference is canceled by the RMS voltage." (not true, since Root Mean Square voltage is only an aspect of AC current). Thus he genuinely believed that 120 volts would charge a 12 volt battery in a giffy. All he needed was a small capacitor converter that "would stop sparks" when he would connect the battery to the lamp chord he had ready. Except he left the lamp chord plugged into the wall socket, and live. One lead was touching the aluminum molding on the Winnebago's Masonite interior. By this time the man's teenage son was already done dipping in a pond that was less than 10 feet from his Winnebago. Barefoot, he stepped onto the metal running board, got electrocuted, spasmed and staggered backwards into the 3-foot deep water, and drowned. When his son had been missing for more than 4 hours, the electricity genius father and his wife called the county sheriff's office. The deputy asked simple questions, retraced the man's story and within 15 minutes found the boy in the water.

The anatomy of chainsaw respect fail

This recent incident with a chain saw (a Michigan man accidentally hits his wife with a chainsaw, his sheriff's deputy neighbor is quick to responds to the scene, but it was too late) resembles the poor judgment using a chain saw in one of my cases: A man was doing minor yard work using his lightweight chain saw. After his was done, he realized he always wanted to trim unsightly boards protruding from his patio and abutting the side of his house masonry. He thought he could just nip the boards with the round end of the chain saw. Except he underestimated that physics of the chainsaw. As soon as he revved it up and touched a board, in a blink of an eye that chainsaw's round end bit the board, climbed onto the masonry and hit the man on his face, to the side of his nose. He was very lucky that he and his family agreed to the full reconstructive cosmetic surgery, which was very professional. It has bee less than a year and he has very little marks left that would testify to the violent accident. He says he never suspected chainsaws to have the unpredictable tendency to kick back.