The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (7 page)

Certain land animals have evolved over the millennia to use speed in the pursuit of prey or avoidance of predators. The cheetah (
Acinonyx jubatus
) can run as fast as 60 mph over the plains of Africa, and the pronghorn antelope (
Antilocapra americana
) can reach 55 mph over the plains of North America. Humans (
Homo sapiens
) are not among the animals built for speed. So things were bound to go wrong when a nineteen-year-old male, driving the A67 highway near Blerick, sought to impress his two passengers by putting his car on cruise control at 20 mph, getting out of the car, and running alongside it. He planned to jump back in and drive on, but the moment his feet hit the ground, he fell over and slammed headfirst into the asphalt. He died the next day.

Reference: Telegraaf, Dutch Teletext,
Guinness Book of World Records

 

According to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, the fastest 100m dash time is less than ten seconds, resulting in an average speed of 23 mph from a dead stop.

 

 

Sprinting in the
Guinness Book of World Records
www.DarwinAwards.com/book/guinness.html

 

 

 

In September of his senior year at the University of Nebraska, twenty-one-year-old Derek wrote an impassioned declaration of independence from seat belts for his college newspaper. Although “intrusive and ridiculous” seat-belt laws saved 6,100 lives a year, according to statistics from the U.S. Congress, Derek concluded with the statement, “If I want to be the jerk that flirts with death, I should be able to do that.”

Derek “was a bright young boy, a 4.0” majoring in five subjects and planning to attend law school. But good grades don’t always equate with common sense.

Derek was returning from a holiday in San Antonio, Texas. The driver of the Ford Explorer and his front-seat passenger both wore seat belts. Only Derek was willing to buck the system, sitting without a seat belt in the back seat because, in his own words, he belonged to the “die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up, no matter what the government does.”

When the SUV hit a patch of ice, slid off U.S. 80, and rolled several times, Derek, in an involuntary display of his freedom, was thrown from the vehicle. He died at the scene. The other occupants of the SUV, slaves to the seat belt, survived with minor injuries.

Alcohol was not involved in the accident.

Reference:
Lincoln Journal Star

Bobby, fifty-one, had trouble getting his truck to start. He couldn’t be in two places at once, working under the hood and pressing the accelerator. Why not take a handy ice scraper and wedge one end against the accelerator and the other end against the seat? Then he could get under the hood and bypass the starter by connecting terminals on the starter solenoid.

Success!

Unfortunately he had forgotten to put the truck in neutral and it began accelerating toward his neighbor’s motor home. Police concluded that Bobby jumped in front of the truck to prevent it from crashing into the motor home. He was partly successful. A neighbor found him pinned between the truck and the motor home, nearly dead. Paramedics rushed him to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, where the would-be mechanic died from terminal creativity.

Reference:
Salt Lake Tribune, Provo Daily Herald

Phil needed to make repairs to the underside of his car. But when he jacked it up, there wasn’t enough room for him to work. So he removed the car’s battery, placed the jack on top of it, and set to work again, this time with plenty of elbow room.

Unfortunately for Phil, car batteries are not designed to carry much weight. The battery collapsed and the jack toppled, trapping him beneath the car. Unable to breathe due to the weight on his chest, he quickly expired in a pool of battery acid.

This incident is illuminated by two additional facts: First, Phil’s occupation was accident prevention officer at a large food-processing plant. And second, ten years previous, he had been working under a car when the jack collapsed, trapping him and breaking one of his legs.

Some people just don’t learn—even from their own mistakes.

Reference: Personal account of his work mate;
Daily News,
Taranaki, New Zealand

It looked at first like a bizarre traffic accident. Smoke rose from the charred remains of a large tree that had toppled onto a smoldering pickup truck. The body of a man, burned beyond recognition, was found inside the truck. Investigators were puzzled. How could the truck have collided with a tree
behind
a house? Why did the tree fall onto the truck instead of
away
from it? And what had started the fire?

As the pieces of the puzzle snapped into place, it became clear that the dead man was the victim of his own device. Reggie, forty-seven, had offered to remove a tree behind his girlfriend’s house. He borrowed his father’s pickup truck, apparently in the belief that he could yank out the bottom of the tree, which would then, cartoon-like, fall away from the truck. He tied the truck to the tree and floored the accelerator.

The uprooted tree, pulled in the direction of the force, toppled onto the truck, crushing the cab and trapping Reggie. The still-running engine eventually overheated, starting a grass fire that ignited the truck’s gas tank, turning it into a fireball that spread to the tree.

Mercifully for Reggie, police determined that he was probably dead before the truck caught fire.

Reference: AP

Paul, forty-eight, was an electrician for the state department of transportation (DOT). He and Zachary were part of a fifteen-person crew assigned to replace the lights in the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The crew would ride through the tunnel in a converted dump truck that had a ledge on the back used to hold tools during the procedure. DOT uses a different truck for each side of the tube, because the ceiling in the eastbound tube is three feet higher than the ceiling in the westbound tube. The taller truck therefore had a tight squeeze returning through the westbound tube. Paul and Zachary should have paid more attention to this fact.

The crew had finished working on the eastbound tube. On the return trip to the office for their lunch break, Paul and Zachary chose to violate safety and rules, and rode on the high platform, facing backward, rather than climbing into the cab. Paul and Zachary learned one major reason for the rules when the truck turned into the westbound tunnel…

Perhaps they had forgotten that this tunnel was three feet lower than the one they had just left. Perhaps their safety helmets made them feel invincible. They soon learned otherwise. When his head hit the entrance of the tunnel Paul was knocked off the truck to his death. Zachary was sitting lower than Paul and survived with minor injuries, earning himself an Honorable Mention.

Reference:
Daily Press,
AP

“The family that plays together, stays together.”

Alan, a forty-three-year-old electrician, was hanging out with his seventeen-year-old son and the son’s girlfriend. They were feeling cooped up, so they hopped the back fence to play by the railroad tracks that ran behind it.

 

“Dope on a Rope” is also the search-and-rescue nickname for the practice of dangling a rescuer under a helicopter on a fixed rope, as opposed to a powered hoist, to assist a victim.

 

 

Alan thought it would be a blast to watch a shopping cart being dragged by a train. He tied one end of a twenty-foot rope to the shopping cart and the other to a full water bottle, which he planned to use as a weight.

When an eighty-six-car Union Pacific freight train rumbled through at fifteen miles per hour, Alan stood behind the cart and hurled the bottle at the train. The bottle broke! So he quickly tied another bottle to the rope.
Standing in front of the cart,
he lobbed the bottle under the train, and gleefully noted that his plan had worked this time—until the shopping cart whipped into him and dragged him for more than a mile along the tracks, reportedly pulling up two spikes in the process.

 

 

Alan was dead before the engineer could stop the train. A spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration said that this was “an extremely unusual occurrence.” Alan’s son told reporters, “He was just the funniest guy.”

After the incident, Simi Valley Police Sergeant Joe May warned pedestrians not to loiter near train tracks.

 

Reference:
Los Angeles Herald-Tribune, Ventura County Star