5 Freak Accidents Unleashed by a Vengeful Universe

5 Completely Sucked Through a Too-Small Hole

A Norwegian oil company used to have a drilling rig in the North Sea called Byford Dolphin. This rig had a system for diving, where workers would enter a sealed pressurized chamber that connected to a low-pressure diving bell via an airlock. When operated properly, a diver would go from the bell to the airlock, gradually change the pressure and then move safely to the wider chamber. But on this 1983 day, the divers just kind of flipped open all the doors at once. Nine atmospheres of pressure in the chamber whooshed through the passage into the bell almost instantly. 

Four divers died, and we really want to highlight what happened to one of them, Truls Hellevik. This man was sucked through the small opening in the stuck chamber door, pictured below. You might note that this isn’t a large enough opening to fit a human, as the doorway was designed to just barely fit a human even when fully open. Hellevik got sucked through anyway. 

The details of exactly what happened to his body are probably best left to the imagination. If you agree, we encourage you to skip forward to the next story, which isn’t anywhere as bloody. But if you prefer details, well, here they are: The medical examiners received Hellevik’s remains in four separate plastic bags. All of his internal organs had been ripped out via his throat. That included his spinal cord, while the liver shot out and landed on the floor almost intact.

His head split apart, with his brain being blown far out of his head. One arm was wrenched off the body, while the other remained attached but got shredded apart. Both legs tore from the body, and one was never found. The medical report includes photos, including of his face, which had been separated from his skull. 

Let’s include just one more sentence from the report: “The penis was present, but invaginated.” You can figure out what that word means even if you’ve never encountered it before — the penis was pushed into the body, as though turned inside out. When you saw the title of this entry (“sucked through a too-small hole”), some of you snickered at how that sounded like sex. No one’s laughing at the thought of sex now. 

4 The Long-Term Mouse Infection

What terrible things could happen to you in a lab? Specifically, in a lab where you handle genetically altered animals? Probably a great many terrible things, including the extinction of the entire human species. For maximum paranoia, know that you might not realize what’s happening until years later. 

This story starts with a mouse. It was a mouse that French scientists had deliberately infected with a variant of Mad Cow Disease. Why had they done this? Because they’re scientists, that’s why, and you can’t stop them. Mad? “Mad,” you say? We’ll show you mad!

A 24-year-old lab tech, Émilie Jaumain, was handling some frozen transgenic mouse brain tissue, which is all in a day’s work when you're a 24-year-old lab tech. She accidentally cut her thumb, however, with the forceps she was using. She had been wearing latex gloves, of course. In fact, she’d worn a double layer of latex, but the forceps went through both and drew blood. Though she noted the incident at the time, nothing seemed to be seriously wrong. 

She experienced no symptoms for seven years. Then came 2017, and serious pain. The muscles on the right side of her body became excessively toned. While that sounds like a superpower, it amounts to a lot of stiffness, which still isn’t as bad as what came next — memory loss and hallucinations. She had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a prion disorder that had wormed its way into her head. It took a while to spot it, but even if they’d diagnosed it earlier, it would have made no difference. No treatment exists for it, so it killed her. 

The family tried filing charges against the lab (maybe metal gloves could have saved her, they said), but that didn’t go anywhere. The only figure truly at fault was the mouse who planned all this, and he died long ago.

3 Down a Pipeline Out to Sea

Up next is our second story about underwater people getting uncomfortably sucked somewhere. In fact, it’s our second of three stories about underwater people getting uncomfortably sucked somewhere, each one strange in its own unique way. 

In February 2022, five divers were working on an undersea oil pipeline off the coast of Trinidad. In theory, the pipe should not have suddenly sucked them all inside. The pipe was supposed to contain oil, and it contained a plug, so there should have been no crazy pressure differential swallowing them up. But the pipe on this day held a bunch of water and some air, and the plug moved out of place, so it swallowed them up after all. One of the men had a GoPro running, so we have footage of their point-of-view during this:

At one point, the video appears to be replaced with a still image. That’s because we’re watching a recording off another screen, and this part is actually the total darkness of the pipe’s interior. The pipe measured 30 inches in diameter. That meant the hole wasn’t so narrow that anyone became dismembered or invaginated, but they found themselves stuck in single file, facing the wrong direction to escape and unable to turn around.

They inched their way out, crawling in reverse to traverse the hundred feet they’d been shot down. But several of the men were injured and had to stop. Just one man, Christopher Boodram, made it all the way. He only managed to leave the pipe’s air pockets and continue toward the exit because he stumbled on the scuba tank that had been pulled off him during intake. During a later inquiry about this incident, Boodram testified about the horror of leaving the other men behind — and the horror of the Paria Fuel Trading Company not rescuing those four afterward. 

The company could have staged a proper rescue, and courts are still figuring out whether their failure to do so counts as manslaughter. The other men were still alive, banging on the pipe from the inside, for another 48 hours. Slicing the pipe open at the correct spot would not have been hard. Neither would repairing it afterward. In fact, we know just where Paria could have found an entire team skilled at repairing pipelines. 

2 Death in a Flight Simulator

In 2014, three people died in a plane crash while learning how to pilot a plane. The weird part is that none of them were in an airplane at the time. 

They were in the Flight Safety International Learning Center at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, inside a flight simulator. A flight simulator, naturally, gives you the opportunity to test your skills at operating a flight console without any of the risk that comes from really sailing through the air. There’s no danger at all — unless, as happened on this October day, an unrelated Beechcraft crashes into the building and kills you from above.

We don’t know exactly why the plane crashed. It sounds so unlikely, that the plane should zero in on this target, that some speculated that it was a suicide attack. Indeed, the pilot had suffered from depression and was on medication. But investigators found no evidence supporting that theory. More likely, having taken off from the airport, and starting to lose control of the aircraft, the pilot now aimed for one of the runways but missed. 

The flight recorder created no clear picture of what had occurred, but it offered some glimpses. We can hear the pilot talking through the preflight checklist and at one point saying, “Eh, fuck it.” This appears to indicate he noted some irregularity and hoped the plane would be able to operate despite this. 

Those were not his last words. No, we instead have him radioing the tower, saying, “Declaring an emergency. We just lost the left engine.” Then, right before the plane suddenly pitched and hit the training center, he said, “Fuck, we’re going in. We’re dead.” 

1 Up Through a River

This final accident happened all the way back in 1916. Workers were digging a tunnel under New York’s East River, and this underground job earned such men an affectionate nickname: sandhogs. 

Once again, we have workers who fell afoul of that old foe: pressure. This time, it came in the form of a compressed air canister. It blew a hole in the roof above three men, prompting them to reach for wood to patch up the hole. We aren’t certain of the chance of success here, since the men would be fighting against the weight of a river, but they never got a chance to follow through anyway. Because even as the river fell into the tunnel, eventually filling it, the men found themselves driven upward by that compressed air, which pushed them with a force even greater than the falling water.

They went through the roof they’d built. They went through the mud that made up the riverbed. They went through the river itself, and then they reached the surface. Two of the three men, quite expectedly, died.

The third man, Marshall Mabey, lived to tell the tale. He described the feeling of being pushed into that mud: “Something was squeezing me tighter than I had ever been squeezed.” He lost consciousness at this point, so we have to rely on other witnesses to tell us he exploded out of the water, rising 25 feet into the air as through thrown up by a geyser. The man now awoken, discovered his body was still working and made his way to the pier, where someone threw him a rope. 

Mabey’s wife told reporters, “Of course I know that Marshall is in danger every time he goes to work, but all work is dangerous.” 

A sandhog made twice as much money as anyone who did construction up on the surface. Mabey was dragged to the Brooklyn City Hospital, but he was largely unscathed, so he left that same day and went home. He announced that he hoped he’d be able to come back to work the following day. 

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