Today I was paddling in the local river, all went fine and well...We put in, paddled down, played in a weir for a while, and paddled back up stream (very little current). When we were about 50-100m away from where we started, a man on the bank called us over...Two high voltage power lines that went to a hospital had fallen into the river about 20 minutes ago...Right there, about 20m ahead of us, between us and where the car was parked...How lucky was that we weren't there 20 minutes earlier? Let me put a scale on this...A branch fell, hit the lines, it caught on fire instantly. The wires hit their conservatory, and their house. Shorted everything in the house instantly, than went into the water and started sparking madly...I don't want to think what would have happened if we had been there....
Anyone else have any stories like this, where despite your controlling the expected dangers, something nearly (or does) happen that was just complete freak chance???
P.S. Thanks to the man who told us, and let us put out in his garden...Kudos.
In my experience theres allways a man with a warning, a rope, or a spanner, or a fuse or whatever else you need. The world is just made that way most of the time, Its no coincidence its just the way things are and you can worry about what ifs, and it does shake you up when these things happen.
Ive had a couple of close calls on my motorbike. Once I hit a lump of lime stone which had fallen off a truck at 70mph. I got a wobble on that big I took out a rear footrest and because I thought I was going to come off I just let the bike do what it wanted,and it just flung its self around wildley then over several hundred yards then it righted its self. I carried on for half a mile till I eventualy calmed down enough to remember how my gears and brakes worked and pulled over to discover I had dented my wheel rim by about an inch though the tyre was still on and inflated. These guys who saw it pulled over behind me to say they thought I was going to fall off. They should have been sitting where I was sitting! The other most bizzare incident was in my early days of biking when I still rode pillion. My then boyfriends bike was broke so I was riding behind Mick and the boyfriend was on the back of someone else.It was dark. A sheep shot out infront of us , we were doing about 85mph. I just clung on to Mick and everything went crazy then everything went still. It took several seconds for me to realise we were still on the bike.According to the guys behind we hit the sheep, went over the top an bounced the full width of the road ontill we stopped.The bike was a CX500 which anyone will tell you is a big heavy bike. The sheep was dead and the front forks were bent right back and the radiator was leaking all over the road. Some one was pointing a torch at the damage and my now ex boyfriend came up and looked at all the antifreeze all over the road and said " I didn't know sheep had green blood" He claims hes said it due to being in shock as when he saw the sheep bounce down the road he thought it was me!
Not really a freaky situation but maybe a spooky one. On a caving trip once which involved a pull through, the type where there is one way in and one way out, once in your committed. Without realising it we got lost and ended up on a ledge some 80ft down. Somehow the rope got stuck and we could'nt unleash it. Now in a position were we could'nt cimb up down, sideways, just stuck, and panic starting to gather momentum. From out of nowhere a light appeared above us and unhooked the rope - getting us out of a very tricky situation. Despite yells of our appreciation, no sounds from above. No one followed us out even though we waited quite a while, and from friends waiting at base, no one followed us in. Not one of us could understand it.
CX500s, yuk, that was god making a point about nasty old Honda vee-twins I reckon. I was once following a Lamborghini up the A1 in North Yorkshire in the righthand lane on my old GPz550. In the lefthand lane was a caravan doing about 60, suddenly the righthand wheel of the caravan came loose and flew off straight over the top of the Lambo, bounced across the central reservation then across two lanes of traffic on the other side of the road before heading off into a field with Zebedee-like spring.
The caravan slewed onto the hard shoulder and half-disintegrated in a cloud of powdered plywood. Hmmm... Interesting.
HAd a similar expereince to Jon's with wheels coming off things.
I was on my way up to Blackpool on the M6 to meet a client when a wheel of a 40 ft Curtain sider decided to detach itself. The wheel bounced along the road with the follwoing cars and me swerving widly to avoid it and each other.
Fortunately the worst damage any of us recieved was chipped paint and windcreens from those plastic tags that are put on wheel nuts to show if they are coming loose! I had one firmly embedded in my headlight!!
A colleague of mine had a similar incident about a month later at almost the same place. Unfortunately the wheel bounced of the bonnet and roof of the car in front of him and came to rest on his bonnet.
And then there was the caravan that disintegrated in front of me and deposited the gas cylinder right in front of me....
Travelling down through Northumberland behind an extra tall removal van on the way to Newcastle airport last month. The van knocked two large branches off a tree above the road, the smaller one hit the windscream and bounced (fortuneately), the larger one landed under the front bumper (a perfectly pitched 'yorker' in cricket parlance), jamming up the front wheels.
I managed to keep the car straight and execute an emergency stop, and the Discovery behind us was kind enought to swerve out and miss us.
No bugger stopped to make sure we were okay though
I was climbing in the Dauphine with a guy called Steve once. We had hired a Scottish guide, and we were scrambling up a steeply angled gully. We were all roped up, and moving together, and the guide led undeneath a rock arch. I was in the middle and had just followed him, and Steve was still the other side of the arch when the guide accidentally dislodged a large block about a foot square in size. It bounced onto my helmet, then off the top of the rock arch, then off Steve's helmet before clattering down into the valley below. "That was a bit dodgy!" I remarked to the guide.
I once dropped Ben H off back at his house after a day out and had just pulled onto the A5.
All of a suddenly, a car travelling in teh opposite direction and towing a trailer lost it's load. Which was a very old "Welsh Dresser" type unit. To say matchsticks is an understatement. It just took off and lifted into the air and turned a summersault and then smashed into the ground.
