Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (35 page)

Death awaits us all, but you never know when you’re about to breathe your last. Here are some folks who died in bizarre ways.

D
ANGER! DANGER!

In 2001 Tyron Watson, an employee at a wheel factory in Akron, Ohio, walked into an area that housed an industrial robot in order to repair it. But the robot hadn’t been properly turned off, and Watson’s presence triggered a motion sensor, which suddenly reactivated the robot. It started moving very fast and smashed Watson into a conveyor belt, killing him instantly.

One of the most popular snacks in South Korea: small octopuses, eaten alive. In 2002, a Seoul man was eating one at home and choked to death on it. Doctors removed the octopus, which was still alive and clinging to the man’s throat. Statistics show that as many as six people a year in South Korea die that way.

Early-20th-century Ethiopian emperor Menelik II had an unusual habit: When he felt sick or uneasy, he’d eat a few pages out of a Bible. He was feeling especially sick after suffering a stroke in 1913, so he ate the entire Book of Kings. A few days later he died of an intestinal blockage caused by the paper.

Boonchai Lotharakphong, 43, ran a sportswear factory in Thailand. Facing money problems, he bought a flag from a fortune-teller who foretold good luck if Lotharakphong flew it from the roof of his factory. As Lotharakphong was carrying the flag to the roof, he slipped and fell to his death.

Eighty-year-old Dennis Wiltshire of Neath, South Wales, liked to race grocery carts in his local supermarket. In August 2005, he
hopped on a cart and rode it down a loading ramp, yelling “Wheeeee!” The cart spun out of control and Wiltshire fell off, fracturing his skull on the parking lot pavement. According to reports, he died instantly.

Mihaly Gubus, a sculptor from Stuttgart, Germany, was killed in 2006 when he was crushed by his 3,000-pound granite sculpture,
Woman With Four Breasts
.

An unidentified man from Tegelen, the Netherlands, died at home in 2003. He had called an ambulance because he felt sick, but died before paramedics arrived. The man’s home was full of dozens of pet parrots. Cause of death: asphyxiation due to overpowering parrot flatulence.

In 2003, Lim Vanthan and his family were planting rice near their home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Lim went for a swim and caught an eight-inch
kantrob
fish, a prized delicacy in Cambodia. But the fish jumped out of Lim’s hands, into his mouth, and down his throat. The fish’s sharp, scaly barbs caused it to lodge in Lim’s throat, suffocating him.

While climbing a cliff on Steeple Peak in Wyoming in 2003, Ryan Sayers, age 20, was struck by lightning during a storm. Amazingly, he survived relatively unharmed, but decided to wait out the storm. An hour later, Sayers was struck by lightning again. That one killed him.

Maria Antonio Calvo of Spain died in 1994. Well, she didn’t really die, but a Barcelona court registered her as dead. After four years of petitioning (Calvo had a child, which was legally declared an orphan), she finally convinced the court that she was living, but since there was no precedent for “resurrection,” she remained listed as dead. She was finally recognized as “alive” in 2006.

If you studied chemistry in high school or college, you may have solved the mystery already. If not, the answer lies just ahead. (Part I of the story is on page 65.)

C
ONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE

As the scientists took samples from deeper and deeper in Lake Nyos, the already high carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) levels climbed steadily higher. At the 600 foot depth, the levels suddenly shot off the charts. Beyond that depth, the CO
₂
levels were so high that when the scientists tried to pull the samples to the surface, the containers burst from the pressure of all the gas that came out of solution. The scientists had to switch to pressurized containers to collect their samples, and when they did they were stunned to find that the water at the bottom of the lake contained
five gallons
of dissolved CO
₂
for every gallon of water.

As the scientists pieced together the evidence, they began to form a theory that centered around the large amount of CO
₂
in the lake. The volcano that formed Lake Nyos may have been long extinct, but the magma chamber that fed it was still active deep below the surface of the Earth. And it was still releasing carbon dioxide gas—not just into Lake Nyos, but into the surrounding environment as well. In fact, it’s not uncommon in Cameroon to find frogs and other small animals suffocated in CO
₂
“puddles” that have formed in low points along the ground. (CO
₂
is heavier than air and can pool in low spots until the wind blows it away.)

But what was unusual about Lake Nyos wasn’t that there was CO
₂
in the lake; that happens in lakes all over the world. What was unusual was that the CO
₂
had apparently never
left
—instead of bubbling to the surface and dissipating into the air, the CO
₂
was accumulating at the bottom of the lake.

In most lakes CO
₂
escapes because the water is continually circulating,
thanks to a process known as
convection:
Rain, cold weather, or even just wind blowing across the surface of the lake can cause the topmost layer of water to cool, making it denser and therefore heavier than the warmer layers below. The cool water sinks to the bottom of the lake, displacing the warmer, CO
₂
-rich water and pushing it high enough for the CO
₂
to come out of the solution, bubble to the surface, and escape into the air.

That’s what
usually
happens, but the water at the bottom of Lake Nyos was so saturated with CO
₂
that it was clear that something was interfering with the convection process. As the scientists soon discovered, the waters of Lake Nyos are among the most still in the world: Tall hills surround the lake, blocking the wind and causing the lake to be unusually consistent in temperature from the surface to the bottom. And because Lake Nyos is in a tropical climate that remains hot year round, the water temperature doesn’t vary much from season to season, either. Lastly, because the lake is so deep, even when the surface is disturbed, very little of the agitation finds its way to the lake floor. The unusual stillness of the lake is what made it so deadly.

There is a physical limit to how much CO
₂
water can absorb, even under the tremendous pressures that exist at the bottom of a 690-foot-deep lake. As the bottom layers become saturated, the CO
₂
is pushed up to where the water pressure is lower. The CO
₂
eventually rises to a level where the pressure is low enough for it to start coming out of solution. At this point any little disturbance—a landslide, stormy weather, or even high winds or just a cold snap—can cause the CO
₂
to begin bubbling to the surface. And when the bubbles start rising, they can cause a siphoning or “chimney” effect, triggering a chain reaction that in one giant upheaval can cause the lake to disgorge CO
₂
that has been accumulating in the lake for decades.

CO
₂
is odorless, colorless, and non-toxic; your body produces it and you exhale some every time you breathe. Even the air you inhale consists of about 0.05% CO
₂
. What makes it a killer in certain circumstances is the fact that it’s heavier than air: If enough
escapes into the environment at once, it displaces the air on the ground, making breathing impossible. A mixture of as little as 10% CO
₂
in the air can be fatal; even 5% can smother a flame… which explained why the oil lamps went out.

The scientists figured that if their theory was correct, there might be other instances of similar eruptions in the past. It didn’t take very long to find one, and they didn’t have to look very far, either: Two years earlier, on August 15, 1984, a loud boom was heard coming from Lake Monoun, a crater lake just 59 miles southeast of Lake Nyos. In the hours that followed, 37 people died mysteriously, including a group of 17 people who died while walking to work when they came to a low point in the road—just the place where CO
₂
would have settled after being released from the lake. The incident was small enough that it hadn’t attracted much attention from the outside world…until now.

In the months following the disaster at Lake Nyos, the scientists continued to monitor the lake’s CO
₂
levels. When the levels began to increase again, they concluded that their theory was correct.

In the meantime, they had also come up with an estimate of just how much CO
₂
had escaped from the lake on August 22—and were stunned by what they found. Eyewitness accounts from people who were high enough in the hills above the lake to survive the eruption described how the lake began bubbling strangely on August 17, causing a misty cloud to form above the surface of the water. Then without warning, on August 22, the lake suddenly exploded; water and gas shot a couple of hundred feet into the air. The CO
₂
had taken up so much space in the lake that when it was finally released, the water level dropped more than three feet. By measuring the change in depth, the scientists estimated that the lake had released 1.2 cubic kilometers of CO
₂
—enough to fill 10 football stadiums—in as little as 20 seconds. (Are you old enough to remember the huge volume of ash that Mt. Saint Helens released when it erupted in 1980? That eruption released only 1/3 of one cubic kilometer of ash—a quarter of Lake Nyos’s emission.)

For the conclusion of the story, turn to page 312.

It’s not always
good
luck, but these are amazing stories nonetheless.

T
HIRD TIME’S A…NEVER MIND

On a Sunday morning in March, 2006, Billy McEwen, 25, of L’Anse, Michigan, was driving down a country road when a horse jumped in front of his car. Unable to avoid a collision, he hit the horse, throwing it up into the air, and crushing the roof and windshield of his car. McEwen’s two-year-old was in the car, but fortunately, the child was uninjured. Police arrived on the scene and were aiding McEwen when 21-year-old Chris Cavanaugh came by in
his
car…and hit the horse as it lay in the road. The crash caused Cavanaugh’s car to roll over, but neither he nor his passenger were injured. McEwen was taken to Baraga County Memorial Hospital, but had to be transferred to nearby Marquette General Hospital. And on the way to Marquette, the ambulance struck and killed a moose. Amazingly, nobody was injured in that accident, either. (Except the moose.)

In April 2006, Carolyn Holt of St. Charles, Missouri, was driving through the city when she suffered a heart attack. Her car veered across traffic and struck a guardrail before coming to a stop. Other drivers quickly stopped to help. Luckily, two of them were nurses, and after a truck driver used his trailer hitch to smash a window and get Holt out of the car, they immediately started doing CPR. But Holt wasn’t responding—her heart had stopped beating. That’s when another motorist who had stopped walked up to the scene. He was a defibrillator salesman. And he had one of the devices in his car. The nurses used it to get Holt’s heart beating, and, thanks to the improbable circumstances of her rescue, she survived the ordeal. One of the nurses, Mary Blome, said, “It was a true miracle that evening.” The salesman, Steve Earle, said it was even more of one than they realized. “It was strange luck,” he said, “because when we finish up work for the day, a lot of times we’ll get in my wife’s car and take it out to eat or to pick my daughter up. For some reason we just happened to get into my car.”

Brandon Day, 28, and Gina Allen, 24, were hiking in the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California when they left a trail and got lost. They wore only light clothing for what was supposed to be a day trip, and had no food with them. They spent that night in a cave. The next day they followed a creek downstream, hoping it would lead them out of the mountains. The creek led them into a gorge—where they found an abandoned camp site. In the camp was a backpack containing food, warm clothes, and matches. They lit a fire and the next day were rescued by search crews who spotted the smoke. Once rescued, they found out who the backpack belonged to: Papers in it identified the owner as John Donovan. Rescue crews knew who that was. Donovan had disappeared in the mountains almost a year earlier. Neither his remains nor his belongings had ever been found. They contacted his family in West Virginia. Chris Cook, a longtime friend of Donovan’s, told reporters, “Even in his death, he was helping people.”