Washington resident Frank Arce recently climbed into a wood chipper. In fairness
to him, it was turned off and he was only doing it to remove something that had
become jammed. What went less well for him was when a co-worker didn’t notice
that he was in there and turned the machine back on.
Too late to escape, Frank was pulled through the
industrial-sized machine and thoroughly mangled. As he came out, he was
somewhat less intact than before; broken was his pelvis, his leg and several
ribs. Shattered was his ankle, bruised was his liver, and collapsed was one of
his lungs. Deeply cut down the length of his body; nothing surprising for a man
that had just been through a wood chipper.
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| In case you didn't know what a wood chipper looked like. |
Except one thing; he’s still alive. Whilst the process of
agonising crushing took only ten seconds (although it probably felt like an
awful lot longer at the time), he’ll likely be in pain for a while as he recovers.
Amazingly he says he didn’t fear death whilst staring straight at it, but was
more scared as he didn’t know what was going to happen.
He states, "I felt I had a lot of angels out there with
me that day – a lot of people looking out for me." And he may well be
right; he was incredibly, improbably lucky.
Ari Carrington