5 Everyday Workers Who Turned Into Action Heroes at Their Jobs
Let’s say you work at a donut shop. Someone walks in and asks the way to the nearest bus stop. You’re authorized to say, “Not my job,” and then to refuse to respond to them in any way. If they never find the bus, that’s not your problem. Your job is to sell donuts.
But some workers rise to the occasion and go beyond the call of duty. Some workers will reveal where the bus stop is. As for the following workers, they saved people’s lives, which is arguably even more impressive.
The Teacher and the Exploding Train
If a car is parked on train tracks when an engine comes barreling down, it’s going to be destroyed, while the train might continue onward unscathed. Trains are so massive that they can knock away obstructions like a windshield plowing into a passing fly. But when a train in Germany plowed into vehicle on the tracks in July 1967, that vehicle happened to be a fuel tanker carrying 4,000 gallons of gasoline.
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The truck was destroyed, of course, and its driver died. It was big enough to cause the train considerable damage, but the real damage came when the fuel splashed over the engine and caught fire. It exploded. Most of the nearby train station got destroyed, and 94 people in the train died, either from the blast or from burns.
One of those 94 was a teacher, Werner Moritz. He was escorting students who were journeying to a summer camp, and when the train caught fire, he now figured his job as escort had expanded. He led a couple pupils out. Then he went back in for more. He got burned, but he kept making more trips. In the end, he managed to save 13 children. Then someone carted him off to the hospital — where he died, from the burns.
Moritz was mourned, and the village of Langenweddingen seriously considered changing its regulations regarding where fuel tankers should park.
A Milkman Used His Milk to Save a Burning Building
Ideally, we’d extinguish fires rather than walking through them. Those people on the train had no means to do so, but Steven Leech, who spotted a store on fire in 2002, found himself better equipped.
Leech wasn’t a firefighter. He was a milkman, which very much is still a real job in England. He saw a gift shop on fire, and he managed to put it out using 320 pints of milk. That’s not a very large amount of liquid compared to what a firetruck uses — a hydrant spurts out that much water in less than three seconds. But it proved enough to put out this fire, saving not just the shop but the seven adjoining shops and the apartments above them.
Thankfully, the fire occurred in January, otherwise the smell of the store after a few hours of soaking in milk would have rendered the block beyond saving. As it was, putting out the fire was a fine accomplishment, and Britain’s National Dairymen’s Association assigned Leech the title of “Hero Milkman of the Millennium.” That seems reasonable. We really can’t think of anyone else competing for that award.
The Pizza Man’s Resuscitation
You ever heard those stories about people calling 9-1-1 but pretending they’re ordering pizza to hide what they’re doing from their attacker? That’s always a smart move on the caller’s part. But sometimes, maybe a pizza delivery guy can provide all the emergency services you need.
Three guys in Glenwood, Colorado, ordered a couple pizzas in June 2015. Then one of the men collapsed, and when the pizza arrived, one of the friends was attempting mouth-to-mouth. That move isn’t terribly useful if the heart isn’t pumping blood around the body. Luckily, pizza guy Anson Lemmer knew CPR and jumped in with chest compressions. These meant that when the real paramedics arrived, the man was still alive and could still be saved.
“I left a pizza boy and came back a pizza man,” said 19-year-old Lemmer. The men gave him a $25 tip, which is fairly big for a $55 order but perhaps not commensurate with saving a customer’s life. Later, Lemmer got $800 in donations from random strangers.
Oh, and that night, he got a free pizza. The three men decided they didn’t want the pizzas after all, so they refused to pay for them. Lemmer took the pies back to the restaurant, and they let him keep one for himself.
The Noble Clown
History’s deadliest avalanche happened in Peru in 1970. An earthquake sent waves at a mountain, a possibility that had long been predicted but had long been ignored. It sent a glacier crashing down, releasing enough mud to fill the Empire State Building 100 times over, traveling at 270 miles per hour. The town of Yuungay got thoroughly buried.
Loads of people died, but this is one more event when a bunch of kids on a pleasure excursion got led to safety. These were children visiting the circus, and when the earthquake hit, a clown there led the kids out of the tent to higher ground that would be out of the mudflow’s path. He got 300 children to follow him, which is an astonishing feat even in the best circumstances.
We don’t know the name of this clown. It goes without saying that he was a supernatural being from another realm, but while most clowns are demons sent here to prey on children, perhaps this one was the exact opposite.
The Prisoners Who Saved a Cop
If movies are any guide, convicts are constantly looking to escape, and once free, they descend upon cities to kill us all. So, when you hear that a group of Georgia inmates were out on work detail one summer day in 2017, and the deputy sheriff overseeing them collapsed, maybe you’d expect the prisoners to take this opportunity to make a run for it. At the very least, maybe they’d smile and watch the cop die.
Instead, they got the deputy’s phone out and called 9-1-1. Then they removed the man’s bulletproof vest, which might have made him worry what was happening if he were conscious, but they did this to cool him off. The sheriff’s office didn’t release the names of six prisoners but surprisingly did release their photo:
All of this happened in a cemetery, by the way, which would seem to set the scene for something truly scary, but no, it ended with a rescue. And as a reward for their efforts, the inmates were given a pizza party, with homemade dessert.
Wait, hold on. As great as pizza and brownies are, we’ve heard enough about workplaces throwing pizza parties to know that “pizza party” is code for “we decided not to truly compensate you.” This is sounding like the skimpiest pizza-based reward since Anson Lemmer got a $25 tip.
Actually, on second thought, don’t hold on. In addition to the pizza party, the inmates received reduced sentences, which is what they really wanted. So, in a sense, their actions that day did facilitate their escape. They were just smart enough to play the long game.
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