A guy in Maine tried to cross a 300-foot span of raging river in zero-degree weather on a snowmobile. He didn’t make it, but he lived, and the machine was pulled out of the water days later. That’s the law up there: if you sink your snowmobile in a lake, you’re required to get it out. They don’t want those things leaking fuel and polluting.
So every year, someone ends up hiring a diver over something that should never have been attempted in the first place. Then there was the homeowner who tried to smother a barbecue flame with leftover wood siding from his own house. He didn’t realize the wood would burn. It did, and his whole house went up.
The fire department showed up, and a firefighter went inside to look for the owner. A neighbor saw him still in the building and asked another firefighter why. “He’s looking for the owner,” came the answer. The neighbor pointed across the yard.
“He’s right over there with the video camera. ” The owner had never bothered to tell anyone he was out. He just stood there filming the whole thing. I did disaster response work for years, mostly in Eastern North Carolina.
During Hurricane Floyd, I had a farmer with a big family refuse to evacuate. The river had broken its banks, floodwater was rising fast, and the police had already given up on convincing him. I drove my truck into his yard, rolled down the window, and asked him to dress his kids in something bright orange or yellow. He asked why.
I said, “So body recovery can tell them apart from all the dead pigs floating around. ” He told me to get lost, but five minutes later the whole family was loaded up and they got out. They didn’t end up as statistics. We had to close a main road through a forest for the winter once because the trees were falling faster than we could clear them.
Snow weighed them down and they kept crashing across the pavement. The detour added over an hour to anyone’s trip. Most cars saw the trees and turned around. One semi driver thought he knew better.
He pulled up to the blockage, called the fire brigade, and complained about why we hadn’t removed the trees. While he was on the phone, more trees fell behind him and locked him in. His truck sat there for a month before we could clear enough to let him back out. It took another month after that before the road was open again.
I was a firefighter and EMT for years, and the dumbest person I ever dealt with was a mother of four who wanted a cute picture of her kids, all under ten, sitting in a rowboat. She untied the boat from the dock and thought she’d just pull them back with the rope. She forgot to hold on to the rope. The boat floated half a mile downriver before the two oldest boys grabbed a branch hanging over the bank.
It was surreal, seeing those four kids in matching outfits sitting quietly in the boat waiting for rescue. They were scared but physically fine. The mother was in full panic mode the whole time and kept getting in our way. I have no idea what happened to her after that, but I hope she started making better choices.
Years ago, we got a call straight out of a comedy movie. A guy had a gopher wrecking his yard, and he was fed up. What he didn’t know was that he was facing the Sun Tzu of gophers. The homeowner, drawing on his time in Vietnam, decided to treat the gopher like a tunnel rat problem.
Instead of a grenade, he poured five gallons of gasoline down the hole, grabbed his varmint gun, and lit it. The explosion blew a small crater in his yard. I’m honestly impressed that the gas-to-air ratio in that tunnel network was perfect enough for a blast like that. But the gopher didn’t surrender.
It shot out of the hole on fire and ran across the yard, setting the grass ablaze. Then it sprinted into the shed, still burning, and burrowed into a void in the wall, where it died. Its flaming remains set the inside of the wall on fire, along with a bunch of flammables. By the end, the backyard was ruined and a quarter of the shed was gone, along with a bunch of power tools and a zero-turn mower.
He would have saved himself thousands if he’d just hired an exterminator. That reminds me of my dad. He hated fire ants. He kept gasoline around to clean grease, and if one ant bit him, it was war.
He’d pour gas on the mound, light it, and deliver a little commentary while it burned. “Stay down there, I’ll show them ants fire. ”
My brother’s wife was a firefighter at the time. There was a massive barn fire that drew trucks from three towns.
Everyone was fighting to get it under control. In the middle of all this, a woman kept calling 911, over and over, asking what was going on at the farm up the road. You’d have to be oblivious not to know—you could see the fire for miles. Later that night, one of the ambulances on scene suddenly left.
That wasn’t normal, but no one had time to question it. A while later, still not close to being done, one of the volunteers from that ambulance came back in his own car. He told the chief there was a woman down the road who called for a lift assist but refused to let the EMTs help her. She insisted on a firefighter.
My brother’s wife went with him to see what the problem was. It was the same woman from the 911 calls. She was lying on the floor, wailing. The EMTs couldn’t find anything wrong.
But once she got her firefighter, she let them help her up. They asked what happened, and she said, “I was just feeling a little ignored. I figured this would get your attention. ” A grown woman laid down on the floor, called for help, demanded a firefighter, all because the barn fire was getting more attention than she was and the 911 operators wouldn’t gossip with her.
She got in serious trouble for abusing the system, but from what I heard, she made a habit of calling for help whenever she felt neglected. She sounded like the type who would fake a seizure in public—actually, the type who would fake a seizure while someone else was really having one, because she was jealous of the attention. We had a teenage girl get her legs stuck in a toddler swing, the kind with the basket seat that little kids sit in so they can’t fall out. She decided it was made for her, got stuck, and lost blood flow to both legs.
We had to cut her out and get her to the hospital. Her legs had become effectively tourniqueted by the plastic. The other category that got to me was people who didn’t wear seatbelts and the people they killed because of it. When you’re not held in place, you have less control over the vehicle.
The first sign of trouble and your body shifts, making things worse. You also become a projectile. If you’re lucky, you only kill yourself. If you’re not, you bounce around and kill a passenger.
It was the leading cause of partial ejections and people ending up outside then back inside the vehicle. So many times I could have just cut someone out of a seat, them barely hurt. Instead, they’d been scalped and died, or they’d crushed their kid, their spouse, their family member, their friend. One case I’ll never forget: a big man in an overturned truck, not wearing a seatbelt.
We were cutting into the passenger side because the truck was on its driver side. He woke up while we were working and kept asking how his son was. At first we didn’t understand. Then we realized he was lying on top of his fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy.
The son was too small to see under the father’s bulk. The boy was wearing his seatbelt, but he died anyway. His father’s body smashed into him and smothered him while we worked to free them. A seatbelt extender would have saved that kid’s life.
And don’t lie to us about whether you wore your belt. It won’t fire the pretensioners if it wasn’t clicked in. There’s a circuit that only completes when the buckle is engaged. That’s how your car knows and sets off that obnoxious alarm.
There’s also a sensor in the passenger seat in most modern cars that detects the weight of a small person, which is why your soda or pizza box sets it off. Just wear the belt and don’t lie. If you were wearing it, I won’t be able to pull tons of slack out of it when I check. And guess what goes in the report, the determining factor your insurance uses to decide whether your medical bills get covered after an accident?
That’s right. I have to write it down. There was a horrifying but effective seatbelt ad in England in the nineties. It said, “Today Joe killed his mom,” then showed a kid in the back seat, unbelted, smashing into the driver’s seat.
It turned me into one of those kids who nagged everyone about their seatbelts. I’ve been in a couple of crashes since and walked away. We had an old guy in a nursing home get his balls stuck in a shower chair. A motorist with a bad alternator had the car die while driving, and the electric locks stopped working.
We got dispatched for a person trapped in a motor vehicle. On arrival, the solution was simple: manually lift the lock knob. You can always tell which ones won’t survive the first twenty-four hours of the zombie apocalypse. I was a firefighter paramedic in a Phoenix suburb.
We had to transport a guy to the ER because he was constipated, and his wife tried to dig it out with a wooden spoon. The spoon got stuck, and they had to bring him in. He was a 250-pound man lying naked on his side with a huge wooden spoon halfway up his butt. That’s not why he had a spoon up his butt.
My dad, also a firefighter, told me about an elderly man who couldn’t get out of his leather recliner because he’d been sitting in it for a week straight. His wife served him drinks and food and he never got up. He just got drunk and urinated and defecated on himself until he was physically stuck to the chair. They had to cut him out.
Two bikini-clad girls had to be rescued from a swift river in a canoe. Neither brought a life vest or a paddle. Something, something, crap creek. A drunk guy in Antarctica chased a penguin.
The penguin stuck its beak through the drunk guy’s calf. He got sent home, and a report about an international treaty breach ended up on some congress member’s desk. Oh, McMurdo, how I miss thee. A guy picked up a metal ring from a hardware store instead of buying an actual cock ring.
It got stuck. He went to the hospital, and the hospital called the fire department because a Dremel turned out to be the right tool for the job. I use mine for small wood projects. I asked a firefighter friend once, and he told me about a guy who was siphoning gas out of someone’s car.
He was sucking on the hose to start the siphon, smoke hanging out of his mouth the whole time. He got burned. There was a man running from police who decided to climb onto a chunk of ice floating down the river. He probably thought he was a genius in the moment, but the problem was that there isn’t really anything north of our town for a few hundred miles.
His long-term planning wasn’t great. We found him hiding under a small icy overhang along the river, suffering from hypothermia. After a brief hospital stay, he was arrested. Years back, I was a volunteer firefighter.
One summer after a long dry spell, two good old boys decided to have a few dozen beers and take their Jeep off-roading in a nearby field. They drove into a patch of tall cornstalks, bone dry, and the stalks jammed up into the undercarriage. On a ninety-plus degree day, that was hot enough to ignite a fire. The field owner saw what was happening and called both fire and police.
I was close enough to go straight to the scene after the page went out. I found these two idiots trying to drive the Jeep faster and faster to put out the fire. Eventually the engine gave out, but they wouldn’t leave the car. I physically had to reach in and pull them out, burning my arms because I hadn’t gone back to the station for my turnout gear.
They’d decided that staying in the car would slow down the flames. Because they thought it was a good idea to keep driving a burning vehicle around a dry field, we ended up with a significant brush fire. We had to call mutual aid from another county. State police got involved.
I made a trip to the hospital, and those two lost their Jeep and the rest of their booze. I worked fire and rescue for a while and helped release several dogs and kids stuck in the mechanism of recliner chairs. Also one bird stuck in a tree. A firefighter told me about a guy who was with a woman when her husband came home.
He jumped out a second-story window buck naked and impaled himself through the upper leg on a fence paling. One of those fleur-de-lis ones, so it messed up his leg pretty badly. They had to cut the paling out of the fence and load him into the ambulance with the wood still through his leg. I honestly thought that story would end with someone getting their dangler stuck in something.
That’s worse. Much worse. I used to work at a public grammar school in the summers to pay for college back in the nineties. One of the full-time employees was a nice guy but did dumb stuff because he was careless.
One time he loaded up a trailer with about twenty-five gallons of gas and was driving it across the main school parking lot. He didn’t realize the container had cracked and spilled all twenty-five gallons behind him. He didn’t want to get in trouble, so he decided the best way to get rid of the evidence was to set the gas on fire. He apparently didn’t realize that burning gas produces a massive cloud of black smoke, and a gigantic black smoke cloud coming from a school tends to attract a lot of first responders.
Panicking, he tried to put out the flaming lake of gas by driving over it with his car. The fire department arrived screaming at him to stop driving through flaming gasoline. They got the fire out and then screamed at him for twenty-five minutes. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
I was the dumb call once. My cat got her paw stuck under the dishwasher and was screaming bloody murder. I couldn’t move her paw and couldn’t lift the machine, so I sat with her while my husband called the fire department. She chewed right through one of my favorite blankets in her stress.
The firefighters arrived, not in full suits, but in heavy boots and pants. The moment they came around the corner into the kitchen, my cat miraculously freed her own paw and ran off to hide in the bathroom. We were confused, but at least it was easy. We thanked them, because apparently they were scary enough to free a cat who had zero physical damage, not even a broken claw.
She’d probably hooked her claws on something and just refused to let go. My dad was a firefighter in a small town and once responded to a call at a Chinese restaurant where the owner’s walkway was iced over. The owner didn’t speak much English and had apparently misunderstood what a firefighter does. They salted his front walkway for him, explained that this was absolutely not their job, had a good laugh, and the guy gave them all free egg rolls.
People always asked my dad about crazy calls, and he didn’t like talking about those, so he’d tell that story instead. A friend told me about an emergency call for a miscellaneous electrical hazard. The chief walked in and a woman said the TV in the bedroom was making a weird noise. It was off, but there was a low buzzing.
The chief unplugged the TV, which she hadn’t thought to do, and the buzzing continued. The TV was sitting on a chest of drawers, so he opened the top drawer and found her cell phone just buzzing away in there. Awkward. Recently in San Diego, a group of suburban moms decided to take their infants up a local hiking spot called Cowles Mountain.
It’s not a particularly grueling hike; men, children, and elderly people do it regularly. But there’s a heatstroke warning posted at the trailhead, and it’s been over ninety degrees. These mothers took their babies up anyway. The trail is exposed, and because it’s easy and Instagram-worthy, a lot of inexperienced hikers come out, often carrying almost no water because they underestimate how hot it gets.
Of course, the fire department, EMS, and a helicopter all had to be called. The moms were too exhausted to come down. Rescuers had to hike up, give them water, check them, and some even carried the babies down. It was likely a hundred degrees on that mountain, and they went up in full gear.
The moms came strolling down afterward, laughing and flipping off the cameras, angry that people would have to witness their stupidity. All so they could get a group photo with their infants on a hot day. I was on a backpacking trip through some national parks a few years ago and was repeatedly shocked by how little water people carried. You’re in the middle of the desert, and we’d see people with no pack, just holding a twenty-ounce bottle of water.
Meanwhile, I had three liters in my pack and another 750 milliliters just in case. The fire department and paramedics had to come to my work one day because some kid didn’t know the difference between a swimming pool and a splash pad. There’s an artificial waterfall that goes down into a basin only two inches deep, with fountains for kids to play in. This kid decided to climb up the waterfall—there are multiple signs saying not to—and then dive off into the two inches of water below.
Luckily, he landed flat on his face, so he survived and avoided being paralyzed, but he was knocked out cold. He probably would have drowned if his mother hadn’t heard the splat and come running to pull him out. And for my next trick, I shall dive from the roof onto this damp sponge. This happened to my son when he was six.
He was at a Cub Scout meeting next to the fire station. The firefighters had racks where they laid out their hoses to dry. The little scouts were climbing on those racks, and my son’s chubby leg slipped between the bars and got stuck. The firefighters had to use the jaws of life on their own racks to free my kid.
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