What are your real life brushes with disaster?

[Losethem (imported)]

Another thread where someone spoke about their brush with "greatness" in attending a session with Marshall Applewhite (Heaven's Gate cult fame), got me thinking...

We've probably all had some sort of brushes with "greatness" in our lives, myself having grown up in a town where Hollywood would show up to film once in a while, I'd see actors and actresses periodically. To this day, they hold no special significance to me because of that... they're just people.

However, this led me to wonder what kinds of brushes with disaster people here in the archive have had. This would be, you turned out ok, but the event in question later (on another day/date/etc. Not the SAME event you were witness to) led to some sort of disaster or catastrophe.

My list is as follows:

1. I drove across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge almost exactly 24-hours before the big 1989 earthquake struck, knocking out a section out of the bridge, after getting off it, I drove down the freeway which collapsed in Oakland, CA during the same Earthquake. Good thing teenage me decided to go visit the amusement park the day before, and not that day.

2. I had flown both TWA flight 800 and United Flight 93 before planes with those flight designations crashed (TWA 800 in New York, and United 93 during 9/11).

3. I have also been in all the locations of the 9/11 attacks at one time or another prior to those events (I was given a private tour of the Pentagon by a friends uncle who was an officer stationed there and we walked through the part that was later hit), inside the World Trade Center buildings in New York, and have driven adjacent to the location in Pennsylvania where United 93 was deliberately crashed into the ground.

Fortunately in the last almost 20 years, I've not had such brushes with disaster. I'm still convinced because of these, I'm probably not going to pass away through natural causes when it's my turn to go.

What kinds of things have any of you experienced that might be like this?

[Stevenator (imported)]

I don’t see how anyone could associate Marshall Applewhite with greatness. He convinced 40 people to kill themselves so that the alien spacecraft following the Halle Bop Comet would take their bodies to another world. The guy was nuts.

A brush with disaster to me means escaping a close call with death. Not exactly like the examples given, but I’ll play along.

I can’t really think of any disastrous close call. I survived a bad car accident back in 1982. If I’d been wearing a seat belt at the time, I would have been killed.

Once on a fishing trip out of Miami to the Bahamas in a 21 foot open fisherman, we got hit my a monster thunderstorm in the middle of the night. The boat broke loose from its anchor and was being pounded against a rocky beach. Upon getting out if the boat to push it off the beach, the anchor line got tangled around my leg and I got pulled under for way too long. We fought that horrendous storm for 90 minutes. Falling asleep later, exhausted and soaking wet.

On the way home on the 90 mile crossing, we got hit back another raging thunderstorm with gale force winds. We were 15 miles from home when it hit, and it took us four hours to go those last 15 miles. It was a terrifying ordeal. There was massive lighting strikes popping all around the boat. My friend recognized that the noise we were hearing was the singing of our graphite fishing rods from the static electricity in the air, immediately dropping them to deck level to keep them from attracting a lightning strike.

The rain was so hard and so intense, that we had to wear our diving masks just to see. We had to hang on so tight because of the chop, the boat was slamming! into the ocean surface from the top of ten foot waves. These waves were one after the other after another for over four hours. Up a wave, then drop! Then slam! Then up, drop! then slam! Over and over and over for three hours. Our forward speed was crawling. When we got back to dock, I swear we didn’t speak to each other for three days. Mainly from sheer exhaustion and being stunned at what we went through.

To add insult to injury, we only caught a few fish that trip. The previous trip to the Bahamas, the boat would barely contain all the fish we caught.

But I’m accordance to the examples given, I’d say that I’ve had a few similar situations.

I used to work in the airline industry. A good friend of mine in Miami used to own a plane, and we’d fly his 172 over to the Bahamas to go fishing every so often. He later became a chief pilot for a small outfit out of Palm Beach. One night he was flying a check ride with two other people with the airline. I think they were distracted by something in the cockpit, but they did a controlled flight into Lake Okeechobee and all three were killed.

One carrier I used to work for at one time had the same 727-100 that D.B. Cooper took his famous jump from. It was always fun to tell other employees about this fact that were unaware. They’d always walk to the aft stairs and stand there a minute or two in contemplation.

Two of the carriers I worked for, I talked with pilots the day before they died in a crash.

My brother knew one of the flight attendants that was on Flight 93.

I once was able to track an aircraft that was involved with a fateful flight. I knew through airline mergers that Northwest Airlines was still operating the Baby-9’s they acquired by way of Southern Airways through mergers of Lake Central and Republic Airways. I found the new tail number that NW flew, and knew they overnighted DC9-15’s in our station, and sure enough, one was parked there one night.

The aircraft in question was involved in the longest hijacking in US History on Southern Airways Flight 49.

I encourage anyone to look this up, as it was an absolute harrowing event. In fact, I read the book, “ Odyssey of Terror: Flight 49” in one sitting.

Back then, airlines operated hops between airports that could have been 30 miles apart. Probably due to the fact that in 1972, deregulation hadn’t happened yet, and all routes had to be approved the Civil Aeronautics Board. Flight 49 was one of these type of flights.

I believe the flight was hijacked in Birmingham. One of the hijackers was angry that he filed a $250,000 police brutality suit against the City of Detroit. The judge offered them 0.25¢ instead.

This hijacking went multiple places. They wanted to crash the plane into Detroit City hall. They eventually wound up in Canada, but they refused to grant them asylum. They wanted to crash the airplane into the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility. Then they decided that they wanted to go to Cuba.

This hijacking lasted for over three days, and everywhere they went, they were never allowed to turn the engines off, so they were constantly in need of fuel. It’s a wonder that the engines didn’t melt from lack of oil.

But when they got to Cuba, (the first time), they realized they were not going to get a hero’s welcome. Presumably by then, Castro had tired of all the hijackings into Cuba. So they left again. Needing fuel again, they dropped in on Orlando. By now they ordered the tiny aircraft to fly to Africa. The idiot hijackers got supremely annoyed when they were told the little plane wouldn’t make it that far.

About this time, the FBI in Orlando attempted to shoot out the main gear tires, but jet airliner tires being what they are as super thick plied tires, the shotgun slugs started to ricochet into the fuselage. The hijackers realized what was happening, and shot the first officer. They ordered the plane aloft and back to Cuba again. Upon landing, the condition of the tires being shot by the FBI, the tires shredded upon landing and the aircraft became disabled on the runway. The hijackers were then arrested by Cuban officials.

All three hijackers were released about ten years ago. I believe one of them is still in Cuba. I think one of them died, and the other returned to Birmingham. In my strongly held opinion, none of them suffered enough punishment.

But that one night on that aircraft, I relived every scene described in the book. From the hijackers getting drunk on ransom beer in the aft galley, to them walking up and down the aisle passing out stacks of 20’s of the ransom money. They demanded $2 million. They were delivered $200,000. They never knew the difference.

But the scariest part of that night was standing in the cockpit door with my hand on the first officer’s seat, knowing that I was standing in the same place where one of the hijackers pointed a .357 at the pilot and pulled the trigger, shooting him in the shoulder.

That literally made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

[Losethem (imported)]

Well greatness is perhaps not the best word for that Heaven's Gate guy, how about notoriety?

Those hair raising historical events you get to see in person... Yup, have had a couple of those. Things that are just eerie! I think mine is the visit to a German concentration camp, and not one of the famous ones. Buchenwald is known, but not as well as Auschwitz. It also wasn't a death camp, despite the fact several thousand died there. When you realize the number is that big, and how small the place is in reality, it's chilling.

The American's liberated it, but gave that German state over to the Soviet occupation in exchange for West Berlin, I think. The Soviets thought the place was bad. So bad, in fact, they decided to re-purpose it into a political prisoner camp. If you were a German living in the area during the cold war, and someone went missing? Odds are they were up on the mountain, and perhaps buried in it.

Chilling...

[eunuchorn3 (imported)]

I survived the amputation of my left leg, on a wheelchair and with a prosthetic leg and walker I can stand all by myself. but there's been no place to talk about this here. your nuts? go to center stage. your leg? don't want to hear about it

[Alleycat (imported)]

I survived the amputation of my left leg, on a wheelchair and with a prosthetic leg and walker I can stand all by myself. but there's been no place to talk about this here. your nuts? go to center stage. your leg? don't want to hear about it

Well This is the Eunuch Archive after all. Not the peg leg archive, Thats by the docks.

[cutnbulls2ox (imported)]

I survived the amputation of my left leg, on a wheelchair and with a prosthetic leg and walker I can stand all by myself. but there's been no place to talk about this here. your nuts? go to center stage. your leg? don't want to hear about it

Maybe you could start a new website for people dealing with amputations. There must be a lot of people who feel as you do about having no place to discuss your body modifications with others. I think those things would not find an appreciative reception on this website, since it is aimed at other interests.

[Losethem (imported)]

Maybe you could start a new website for people dealing with amputations. There must be a lot of people who feel as you do about having no place to discuss your body modifications with others. I think those things would not find an appreciative reception on this website, since it is aimed at other interests.

I think it's less talk about amputations is forbidden, but simply not topical for most of the folks who visit here, so it simply fails to gain traction in any meaningful way as a conversation topic. Personally, I have no problems with it.

I'll admit, this isn't the direction I expected this thread to go. I opened it more as a way for people to report weird coincidences which they've avoided disaster but for being elsewhere on a different day, time, etc. when something later happened in the location they've been. IE, like my flying those airplane routes on the flight numbers which later had calamity befall them.

[JessicaH (imported)]

There was a bomb that went of in the Istanbul airport the day after I walked by the spot and then the mall in Nairobi was destroyed by terrorists shortly after I visited the mall.

[Stevenator (imported)]

I get long winded when telling stories.

I apologize for derailing the thread.

[cutnbulls2ox (imported)]

This is a very interesting thread. Eunuchs live on the edge of danger.