Fire Mad! WARNING – Not for the squeamish! The following are all genuine and bizarre emergency services reports from around the world. They are reprinted verbatim, and the Fire Product Search team accept no responsibility for their content.
Fire Mad Golf Anyone?
This is a crazy picture of a gentleman called Thomas golfing next to a huge house fire in the USA. Luckily firefighters are on the scene and taking care of the issue and thankfully no one was hurt.
Toddler Tucks Head into Toilet Trainer – Fire Mad
A toddler had to be freed by firefighters after he got his head stuck in a child’s loo seat.
George de Souza’s parents initially thought it was ‘hilarious’ when the three-year-old first put the adult toilet training device round his neck. But mother Kelly Skyring, 33, and dad Darren de Souza, 43, of Romford, Essex, began to panic when they realised they couldn’t get it back off.
Mr de Souza said his son started to get upset and his other two children Kelsey, 16, and Alfie, eight, resorted to using moisturiser to try to slip the toilet seat off George’s head.
After being stuck for 45 minutes, Mr de Souza decided ‘the only thing he could think of’ was to ring the fire brigade. Firefighters soon arrived at the address and took 15 minutes to release the distressed toddler after they turned the seat around and wiggled it off.
Watch manager Steve West, who was part of the Harold Hill Fire Station crew called out to the de Souza home at 10pm on Wednesday last week, said: ‘It’s definitely one of our more unusual call-outs.
‘He had been a bit upset but once we turned up he was happy and nice as pie.
‘His mum said he was a big fan of the fire brigade. I think the parents were a bit panicky and didn’t want to hurt him but we just turned the seat round and wiggled it off.
‘I made him promise not to try it on again!’
Truman Duncan is Fire Mad!
When you work on the railroad, you probably know that something terrible can happen. Maybe you’ll break a bone, or lose a limb?
That’s what happened to Truman Duncan, who, after falling off of a moving train, was dragged underneath the wheels. They severed his body in half at the waist, incredibly leaving him alive and conscious to hear the machinery grinding his body in two as he was dragged 75 feet.
Truman decided that screaming like a little girl was neither manly nor helpful and instead pulled out his cell phone and dialed the emergency services from right there under the train. Then, because it took rescuers 45 minutes to get him out from under the train, he placed a few calls to his family as well.
Doctors are unsure how he managed to survive the accident but suspect that the weight of the wheels may have kept him from bleeding to death (though not very well–he lost about half the blood in his body). Still, it took 23 surgeries over four months before Truman could leave the hospital, minus his legs, pelvis and a kidney.
Today, Truman is back at work at a desk job. He says he can still do the things he did before the accident like swimming, playing with his kids and screaming.
Truman Duncun today
Ron Hunt and his drill – Fire Mad
In 2003, California construction worker Ron Hunt was working a spot that required him to balance on a ladder with a massive chip auger drill. Because the universe has a very peculiar sense of humor when it comes to people balancing on rickety things while holding dangerous objects, the ladder broke and Hunt went tumbling down, face first.
The good news was that his fall was cushioned. The bad news was that the thing doing the cushioning was his goddamn drill. The massive drill bit went straight into Hunt’s eye socket, tore a highway through the moist insides of his head and exited via the back of his skull.
Amazingly, this Final Destination style coup de grace didn’t kill Hunt. The stunned man didn’t even quite realize what had happened until his wandering hand met the drill bit entering his eye … then some more of said drill bit exiting the back of his head. As moments of enlightenment go, that must’ve been a pretty bad one.
Poor, understandably freaked out Hunt was hurried to the hospital by his equally freaked out co-workers. At first, the doctors were at a loss: How would they remove the thing? They decided to cut off the bits that were sticking out and remove the rest surgically, when one of them noticed in the middle of the operation that, hey, the drill was actually kind of loose. So they adapted a second strategy: They just unscrewed the thing, as if Hunt’s head were a block of wood. Slowly. Unscrewed. The giant drill bit. Inside his head. Right … through … his … face.
“I would have done it myself, but I was tired.”
And it worked like a dream. Throughout the process, Hunt (who was kept conscious, but luckily aided by the magic of morphine) was talking and making jokes and very much not brain dead. Somehow, the drill bit had pushed his brain matter aside instead of ripping a pathway through it, so apart from the eye and the giant hole in the back of his head, he was more or less fine.
Firefighters forced to use gas masks, but not because of smoke – Fire Mad
Firemen were forced to don gas masks and protective hazmat suits while rescuing a bedridden 25-stone man – because he had not washed in five years.
Neighbours believed their block of flats, near Stuttgart, Germany, had been targeted in a chemical attack when rescue workers arrived in full biohazard suits. But they were actually there to rescue a morbidly obese gentleman, who was found in a pile of rubbish after a neighbour heard a tapping on her ceiling.
One firefighter, who had to smash down the 65-year-old’s apartment door, described the smell as “absolute hell”. He said: “It was knee deep in rubbish, from rotting pizza boxes to old food and tins and vermin rustling about”. “The smell was indescribable.”
The man told rescuers he had been living on take-away meals delivered to his apartment, and had not been able to wash for five years. Too fat to exit through the door, he had to be lowered by crane to a waiting ambulance.
Workers were later seen disinfecting their clothing and hosing off equipment used to hoist the man out. A neighbour told a German newspaper: “We had no idea what kind of state his apartment was in, but we got a whiff of it after firemen opened the front door”
Man admits murder 17 years ago due to supermarket texts – Fire Mad
A Watauga County man says texts from Walmart caused him to become paranoid about a murder he says he committed 17 years ago in Arizona.
According to the Charlotte Observer, Matthew Gibson was living in a small settlement near Boone when he felt he needed to divulge his secret. Gibson, 55, drove to Arizona and met with Detective Alicia Marquez of Winslow Police Department and said he wanted to talk about a crime he committed more than a decade ago.
Gibson told the detective that he met a woman in Bullhead City, Ariz. in 1997 and they went back to his trailer. She became loud and obnoxious, so he told her to leave. When she wouldn’t leave, he says he bludgeoned her to death with a Maglite flashlight and dumped her body by the Colorado River.
Gibson said he would have kept quiet about the incident, but he started getting text messages from Walmart that caused him to be paranoid. He says the texts messages and voice mails from Walmart informed him that a prescription for Anita Townshed was ready. Gibson also later received an envelope with a Walmart advertisement in it but no return name or address.
Gibson, a former cocaine and methamphetamine addict, decided that Townshed must have been the woman he killed and he felt someone might have put “a contract on his head.” So, he drove to Arizona to confess his secret.
Gibson says he didn’t know the name of the 38-year-old woman he’d killed in Bullhead City in 1997. Detectives said the story checked out, but the woman murdered wasn’t Anita Townshed. It was a woman named Barbara Brown Agnew.
Detectives say that without Gibson’s confession, police would never have had a case against him. Gibson wanted to plead guilty to manslaughter and begin his 10-year sentence without delay.
Restaurant Runner – Fire Mad
After a heated argument between staff and a North Carolina man at the Manchester Hilton Garden Inn regarding a bill, the man thought he would stop the arguments by refusing to pay and making a quick run for it.
It is known that the man’s running skills where far better than any of the staff, but obviously he missed out on training the 110m hurdles at High School as he tried to leap the jagged fence and impaled himself. Horribly.
Part of the fence was removed because it had to be sent to the hospital with the man who was stuck on it. After cutting at the fence with hydraulic tools and saws the NCFD where able to remove the fence and unhinge the man (After a few jokes with cutting his leg off to pay the bill).
The man’s name has not yet been released but after an injury like this would you really want the world knowing your name? I think not!
Poetic justice? Or is it poetry in motion? I think poetry in motion is just a wrestling move used by tag-teams and made famous by the Hardy Boys of WWE. But no matter what poetry-related phrase you use to describe karma, this fella earned every inch of that fence through his leg.
Ar-Son’s – Fire Mad
Austrian police say an arsonist mother tipped off her firefighter sons so they were always first to arrive at her fires. They say her sons became suspicious after the ninth call in a month.
The woman, from St Stefan ob Leoben, in Styria, faces arson charges. She says she wanted them to look like heroes. Graz police spokesman Johann Stamfl said “A 47 year old woman has been questioned and admitted responability for the fires. She will appear in court later but for now she is released on bail”.
He confirmed that she set several small bulidings on fire because she wanted her sons to look like heroes. The first attack was on 28th December, just after her two sons had joined the force. She was alleged to be so pleased with their quick response that she set fire to the neighbours garage the same day.
Reports say this time she waited for the blaze to develop further so it would be a bigger challenge for the sons. The garage has burned to the ground by the time they arrived. Austrian daily newspaper the Kronen Zeitung says the women then set several other fires in the following weeks to test her sons abilities, leaving investigators puzzled.
The women told the paper: “I was so proud that my two boys had joined the fire brigade that i wanted to make them heroes. I am of course very sorry for all the trouble i have caused. After the first fire, the sound of the fire engine was music to my ears, knowing that my sons were out there helping to save their community”.
A Dutchman’s plan to propose to his girlfriend has ended with a mobile crane smashing the roof of a house and forcing the evacuation of two others. The man had wanted to surprise his partner by descending in front of her bedroom in the town of IJsselstein to sing her a song and pop the question.
But the unsecured crane he used instead toppled into a neighbour’s house.
The woman still said yes, Dutch media report, and the couple are now said to be celebrating in Paris.
Following the initial impact, more damage was done when the crane fell again during an attempt to right it. Residents in nearby properties were evacuated but no one was injured.
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