Some tree cutting stories:
1. One of my old commanders used to tell of a fellow clearing trees after Hurricane Hugo (1989, South Carolina) and this fellow was straddling the trunk of the tree he was cutting. It was caught up with some other trees and when his cut went through the tree he was on it in turn acted like a catapult or in this case a manapult. It tossed him over a couple of houses. Needless to say, he never cut anything again.
2. A LtCol I knew at my guard base was cutting a tree down and it fell over. He was making another cut to complete the job and the trunk was under pressure. His second cut released pressure and it whipped, hit him in the lower leg and severely broke both bones. He was out of action for several months.
A couple of ladder stories:
1. Mine - I was on a ladder. My head was at about 18ft putting my feet at about a 12ft level. I was about to feed an antenna cable into a building through a weatherhead. When I opened the weatherhead a swarm of wasps came out (see wasp nest below. It was in a 4" pipe.) and directly for my head. My brain reacted before reason stepped in and I found myself in mid air thinking "this is gonna hurt."
I landed on the concrete base pat for the antenna tower directly on my heels. End result was two crushed heels, a broken ankle, 4 months in a wheelchair, and 4 months of rehab. I was lucky in a way because the wasps came at me from an angle so I jumped away from them. If I had jumped straight back I probably would have contacted the antenna tower, tangled my feet in it and came down head first.
2. In the summer after I got back to work a contractor was doing some wasp eradication on our building and was on an extension ladder at about 30ft. Wasps came at him and somehow he came off the ladder and landed on the ground directly on his back. On the way down one of the latches that keeps the ladder extended caught him on the leg and gashed him through his calf all the way to the bone. We never did hear what became of him after the ambulance took him away.
About a month after that a swarm of bees decided to make our building a home in various places. One place was the antenna tower I had been hurt by and the other was approximately where the other fellow had been hurt. No-brainer this time - a pest control agency was called that had a high pressure sprayer and there were no ladders involved.
