close shaves…

Not razor based I am afraid!

Was strimming the grass by our fence and got hit in the eye with a pebble. Bloody wtecked and for a few seconds I had thoughts of blindness/blood and so on, luckily there is no real damage.

So what close shaves have you had? 🙂

Lots – the one that still gives me the heebie jeebies is coming very, very close to stepping off the top of a crane in the dark.

That would have been a very long fall.

Almost bought a 26er recently

Bencooper how did u get into that situation! ?

I was climbing it at night without permission – took this pic just afterwards:

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Inchgreen Drydock Cranes

A double trailered logging truck punishment-passed me on the road and pulled in very sharply. He had only got the first trailer past me and as I hopped onto the 8″ kerb, the trailer wheels bounced off the kerb…

Genuinely lucky to be alive.

I presume your now going to buy a face sheild for about a 5er.

I wince when i see folk using even the little electric strimmers without so much as safety glasses for this reason.

With my big petrol brush cutter its steelies, long trews and sleves , mesh face shield and ear defenders

My close shave was using my grinder , id only just got my self a clear face sheild (instead of using safety glasses) and that day my 1mm disk decided to explode sending disk everywhere…..

I had a ricocheting/tumbling bullet zip over my head once.

A set of these landing on my toe and not my head when a chap having a breakdown lobbed them at me from his 18th floor flat. I had my head down writing at the time so never saw them coming.

I was an engineer on a timber railway bridge reconstruction.
I was marking levels for beams using a laser when I dropped my pencil.
I picked it up off the floor. When i was nelt over a chainsaw blade snapped quite some distance away. It flew maybe 15 meters and embeded into the timer i was marking. Had i have been stood it would have wrapped around my head.
I was physically sick.

I was sat taking off my snowboard at the bottom of a snow park and the guy manning the lift shouted at me and pointed up the hill . I looked up to see a runaway board flying towards me…i moved my head forwards a few inches and it brushed past the hood on my jacket. If the loft guy wasn’t looking it would have hit me full speed in the head. I think it would have killed me.

I only realised how close it was later in the day.

No 1:

Driving home from work about six years ago I was on a three-lane road which went over a blind crest. The lanes were two going up, one down with double white lines stopping traffic going downhill from using the middle lane. I was overtaking a lorry in the middle lane going uphill when a Volvo appeared over the crest in the middle lane coming down, heading straight at me! I swerved to the left and spun out onto the bank, missing the front of the lorry by millimetres and my rear bumper clipped the Volvo, ripping a chunk out of it. The lorry driver slammed his brakes on and came over to see if I was still alive. All he saw was the Volvo coming down then a bit of my bumper hit his windscreen. It took me nearly half an our to stop shaking. The Volvo didn’t stop.

The lorry had a forward facing camera so the whole thing was recorded and on watching it back a few days later I found out I had less than a second to see the Volvo, react and get out of the way. The camera never saw my car as I was so close to the front of it. The Volvo was estimated by the police to be doing 80+ with me at about 50. It doesn’t bear thinking what the outcome would have been if I hadn’t swerved.

The Volvo was never traced.

No 2:

Eating my lunch I swallowed a bit of chicken breast the wrong way and started choking. I work alone and was in the middle of nowhere so was immediately in trouble. Couldn’t shake it loose, tried drinking a bit of water but that just went into my lungs! Dialled 999 on my mobile but couldn’t speak so just made a load of random noises. Thankfully the operator realised what was going on so sent an ambulance to my rough location by triangulating my phone signal. I passed out. The next thing I remember is being violently hugged by a big burly bloke while going in and out of consciousness, which didn’t work. Apparently I was then thrown into the back of the ambulance to have a tracheometry, only to bounce off the bed and the chicken to dislodge and pop out.
I had massive bruises all down my back and round my stomach from all the back slaps and heimlich manouvres the paramedic had done and it took me a week to get back to normal. I owe that guy my life, but never found out his name to thank him.

I don’t want a number 3!!! 😯

I was tidying up in the stores at work, and picked up the charging lead for the electric forklift that someone had left hooked over the racking. As I started to coil it, it went tight and I realised it was still plugged in. Next I realised what a dumb system it was, as the connection point in the forklift was a standard 3 pin mains socket and the lead had standard 3 pin plugs on each end. And one end was in the mains, and I was holding the other…..

Years ago I was using a hedge trimmer to cut the hedge in the back garden, cut through the cable but stupidly picked up the still live end, we lived in an old house with no circuit breakers, I don’t know why but I put my thumb over the cut end of the cable, which I quickly realised was sending 240v through me when I started to tingle and then stiffen up. I managed to throw the cable down but I guess that could have been nasty.

And another one. We were driving down saltmarket in glasgow in a convertible with the hood down, my wife was driving. We were sitting at traffic lights and a tipper truck was in front of us turning right as we were, truck sets off with us following, large boulder rolls off the top of tipper truck and lands just to the right of us. Any closer and it would have been on top of us.

Good few years ago driving country road in Buckinghamshire, came round tight corner under railway bridge to find a police pursuit coming towards me with both cars my side of road. Just managed to avoid being hit, had pull over for 5 mins to compose myself as was certain was about to be hit, very hard and not come out if it well.

At breakfast on boxing day, 2004, my very recently betrothed and I decided to check-out of our Thai resort and take a bus to the other side of the country. 40 minutes after we left, just about everyone else at the resort was dead.

I don’t know why but I put my thumb over the cut end of the cable

Natural instinct to stop the electricity from spilling out.

Dropped an angle grinder I was using in a small workshop. Lots of dancing from me to avoid it biting me 😀

Hitting a fully grown stag at 60 this winter- it hit the A pillar as well as windscreen, then bounced down every panel of the car and roof edge, denting and scratching.
If it had been cm’s further over, it would have come through windscreen at middle son and I. 😐

Hell some pretty big ones there. Does it mess with your head at all stoner? I know (imo) its just chance, not a big believer in fate but something of that magnitude must make you think.

Not me but I was involved.
Last summer we were visiting my mum with our little girl, 3. Also there was my sister with her 2 young uns, a girl 4 & my gorgeous little nephew 2. We were playing with balls in the garden after lunch, I was kicking the ball between me & the 2 girls heard a splash & turned around to see my nephew in the pond arms floundering in the air. I’ll never forget the look on his face as his eyes locked with mine as I ran to the pond, a mixture of fear & confusion. I grabbed an arm & wrenched him out, thankfully he was absolutely fine. I cried with my sister for about an hour with the shock of it all, awful.

Throwing up out of the side of my friends car on a quiet a road at about 3am. another car comes round the corner at about light speed and rips the door right off. The dent started an inch from where my head was

I doubt I will ever forget what the underside of a frozen pond looks like after falling into one whilst poking the ice with a stick as a kid. Mum whisked me out. Needless to say, micromtbfixlette is very closely managed around frozen ponds.

maxray – I’m uber fatalistic/pragmatic/atheistic so Im more of a shoulder shrugger than a big thinker. Mrs S and I have never even really discussed it.

A tale that always chills me when I remember it was one told to me by a MTB friend (posts in here so he may pop up) about a time he was hooning around down unknown paths on some foreign island and spied a lip to jump off when his front wheel washed out in the compression on a sandy patch just before the lip. Off he came. Dusted off his pride, checked for witnesses, and walked the bike to the top of the lip. And then realised over the other side was a massive cliff down to the ocean. New shorts and a sit down were required I think.

Big sheet of timber off the back of a lorry while doing 70mph on the A1, fortunately no passenger at the time but it could have been very messy in different circumstances, definitely one of my nine lives.

Working on a roof in Great Portland Street as an apprentice and we used to sit on the parapet to have lunch. The parapet was about 4 foot about the flat roof and this particular day, as a cocky 17 year old I decided to jump into it and very nearly took a fall, which would either have resulted in hitting the struck scaffold 3 stories below, or the street 6 stories below. The look of the guy working with us summed up the ‘what if’ moment!

1. Took mrsnotlocal to be, off to Jamaica to propose. We survived our resort being flattened by hurricane Ivan, only to be nearly washed into the sea 2 days later by a wave breaking over the 15′ high cliff we were lounging on. 2 young girls nearly disappeared in similar circumstances the day before, but the hotel staff didn’t feel it necessary to warn guests.

2. Hit black ice on the way to work with mrsnotlocal (also a Paramedic), and ended up about 40′ down an embankment with the back wheels in the river Dee. A large tree had also done its best to try and fold the vehicle in half on our way down. The plough driver had asked to salt the roads in the morning, knowing it was going to freeze during the night, but his boss in Stonehaven said it was too warm to begin salting.

I was booked onto the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry. Mini bus had a puncture so we missed it.

Afternoon with a few beers in Newquay with a few mates, about 20.00 we’re stood on the beach laughing at my mate in the sea pretending he was being eaten by a shark, screaming and waving his arms.

Then we realised he wasn’t being eaten by a shark and was just caught up in the rip tides near the rocks on fistral so I swam out to him and managed to keep him above the water by submerging myself to where I could touch the bottom and throwing him up in the air by his shorts like in a rugby line out whenever a wave came. Did this 5 or 6 times and quickly realised that he wasn’t catching his breath, and I was just running out myself, not to mention both of us being swept further out ourselves.

Another lad paddled out on a surfboard and pulled him onto it while I swap horizontally to the beach until I could climb out, I literally sprinted up and along all the rough barnacle covered rocks until I was back on the beach where I found my feet covered in flaps of skin the size of £2 coins with sand buried under them. Needless to say we felt like absolute idiots and cleaning the feet out afterwards was NOT pleasant.

@notlocal, mrs notlocal is bloody jinxed.

Swept overboard in the middle of the north sea, in winter, in the dark. Luckily I’d clipped on about 1/2 second before and managed to haul back in before I froze or drowned. Never been so cold.

Knocked silly by boom and went overboard in the middle of the blackwater estuary whilst training. Fortunately it was seen by a powerboater & they picked me up.

Hit a rock descending a pyrenean mountain road at about 50-60, blew out the front tyre and hit the deck. I went through a thick hedge, bounced off the dry-stone wall hard enough to take a chip out of my skull, back through the hedge and into the storm ditch. Without the hedge I would have hit the wall flat-out.

Not fatal but I nearly lost an arm when a winch failed whilst I had hold of the tail end…

In the 1987 storm, in the middle of the night, I had my nose pressed up against the window, trying to see the destruction being wrought outside. As I turned away from the window, a fence panel came through it and showered me with glass. The outcome wouldn’t have been fatal, but I feel sure I would have lost my eyesight.

I don’t go anywhere near windows when it’s windy now.

@iolo. Mrsnotlocal would argue that I am the jynx 😀 She suffered explosive wedge fractures to T6 T8, followed by a month immobilised in hospital. Had to wear a full custom made body brace for 6 months once she was discharged.

More than I care to remember but kind of comes with the job!

However that one up there ^^^^ being swept overboard into the North Sea at night- don’t fancy that one at all!

standing on a ladder fixing an outside bulkhead light. i had cut the lead length to fit to the socket and i had the cut cable end in my mouth ready to fit to the light, when i remembered i had wired it to the plug and plugged it, and yes id switched it on!! that was a close one

Some years ago I was doing about 45mph down a relatively steep hill, only to discover that the car had total brake failure. Fortunately it was 5:30 am so not very busy. Managed to crunch my way down through the gears and then stop by using the handbrake.

Then I sat and had a cigarette and waited for the shaking to stop. It took a while.

Been using a high pressure water jet to clean the decking. Reminded me of a job I had in Israel when I was travelling. Working for a guy who’d bought a field full of flood-damaged – but otherwise new – cars. We were stripping the seats out, putting them into shopping trolleys and blasting the mud off with a high pressure water jet. My mate had the jet and I was holding the trolley. It tipped and I bent to right it. The jet hit me full in the face, cutting my skin from the bottom of my eye to the corner of my mouth. Another few mm and it would have been my eye, no question. Incredibly I had no lasting scar either.

Another one was doing 50 mph down a Herefordshire Lane when I was a yoot. Came round corner to be confronted by a landrover doing similar speed towards me. Swerved out of way and rode the car up onto the banking. Somehow missed the Landrover but flipped car onto its roof and skidded 30-40 yards down the road. Sparks everywhere and when the car came to a halt there was petrol dripping fro the tank. It’s amazing how fast you can get out of a car despite being upside down and hanging from your seatbelt!

On the motorbike, approaching a blind righthander, a chap on a kawasaki came round the other way far too fast, drifted into my lane and passed me on mu left so close we almost touched. In, as it happens, the exact place I’d have been in, if i’d not made a slight arse of the corner and placed myself further right than normal. Don’t know what the closing speeds were, too bloody much. Had a wee bit of a cry at the side of the road after. Not the first time I’d almost been offed through no fault of my own but knowing it was only a mistake on my part that stopped the collision really gets me even now.