Horrific video shows factory worker being pulled to his death into giant industrial shredder (Vietnam)

A Vietnamese factory worker was killed after falling into a giant industrial shredder, with a horrific video showing the moment he was sucked into the machine.

Ro Mah J, 34, was standing inside a large container feeding material into the machine just after 6 a.m. Thursday when his tool suddenly got stuck, local outlet Dan Tri reported.

He frantically tried to yank his tool out of the shredder before being dragged into the machine at the Chanh Tay Gia Lai Joint Stock Company plant, disappearing out of shot.

Ugh. I dated a girl when I got out of the Navy who had been nearly scalped as she worked at a lathe in a high school shop, and her long hair which had been pinned out of the way came loose and the lathe caught it.

Fortunately, they were able to sew her snap back on so the scar didn't show, and she got a bad concussion, but I have to conclude she came out of that rather lucky.

As an aside, Admiral Chester Nimitz and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, foes in WWII, were both missing fingers on their left hand.

Yamamoto lost two of his fingers on his left hand in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 against the Russians when the Mikasa (flagship, commanded by Admiral Togo) was hit by Russian shells.

Nimitz lost his ring finger in 1926 when he was giving a tour to some delegation of the diesel submarine he was on. He was the Navy's leading expert on diesel propulsion, and was in coveralls giving the tour, and when he pointed at an exposed gear while speaking to the delegation, the tip of the leather glove got caught in the gears and sucked his hand in.

It crushed his entire finger up to his wedding band which jammed the gears and saved him from being drawn into the gears and maimed or killed, but he lost the finger to just below the joint. He was very self conscious about it, so it was a surprise to me that it showed in his official portrait:

I lived in Subic Bay when I was a kid. The beaches on the base were near Cubi Point, and there was a good sized tarmac area that always had Phantoms, Intruders, Vigilantes, Spads, Cods, Crusaders and Corsairs on it.

I used to be at the beach all the time, and I spent many hours wandering around that tarmac, looking at the planes, watching both flight ops and high power turns that sent the exhaust right over the beach (though a good way up a bank of rocks, so you wouldn’t get screwed by the exhaust down by the beach.

I loved the high power turns. Heh, no wonder I can’t hear well today. I loved the noise.

Anyway, I was down poking around a F-8 Crusader on the tarmac and a pilot with his plane captain walked up to the plane. The guy was a little bit older, not a young buck, a big guy who looked like he was too big to fit in that cockpit. He was a LCDR, and he climbed up and stuck his helmet up on the frame of the windscreen, if I recall correctly. He saw me gaping at him (I was 12 at the time) and he asked if I wanted to sit in the cockpit.

Heck yeah!

So I climbed up and inside, and he climbed up and handed me his helmet. He let me put it on and lower the visor. I grabbed the stick and throttle...it was great! After I climbed down, the grinned and me and said “Watch when I take off.”

When he took off, as soon as his wheels left the ground, he retracted them, but didn’t alter his attitude. He continued a good way down the runway, nearly to the end, and then he pulled the plane up into what looked like a 45 degree climb, maybe steeper.

As he rocketed up, the plane began to do aileron rolls as he climbed, over and over and over, probably four or five times, then he leveled off and flew away.

It was thrilling. When I went back up on the tarmac the next day, I asked the sailor servicing the planes if the guy was around, and he said no, he was not stationed at the base so he didn’t think he was going to come back, and mentioned that he saw the guy take off, and thought the guy probably got in trouble for doing it.

I think about it now, and it seems hard to believe. By many accounts, the behavior of the pilots was over the top (my dad was the base XO and he spent a lot of time drinking up there at Cubi, so he and my mom both said they got pretty wild) but as a kid, that single Crusader take off was the only hot shot thing I ever remember seeing. I don’t ever remember seeing any high speed flights, low passes, or anything. And I was a kid who would know, because the two things I spent a lot of time doing were going snorkeling and watching planes.

Heh, seems amazing now that I could, as a kid, just walk around on that tarmac with impunity. I remember standing under the wings of parked planes watching proceedings. I did get busted once walking across the runway.

I don’t know what got into me. It seems like one of the stupidest things I ever did.

There used to be an old Hudson airframe by the side of the runway. It was there the whole time I lived there, and we would go up and poke around it it. The seats were gone, the wings were gone, the windows were gone, and the instrumentation was gone, but...there it was.

One day, I was screwing around in it, and decided I wanted to go to the enlisted beach on the other side, so...I just walked across the runway instead of walking all the way along the access road around the part of the runway that jutted out into the water.

I was nearly across the runway, when a jeep with a flag on it drove out, and two guys jumped out, grabbed me by the arms on each side, and hustled me into the jeep. They took me back and began grilling me.

“What is your name? Who is your father? Where do you live? What is your phone number?”

I knew my dad would kill me (not really, he never hit me, but he sure scared me) so I gave a fake name, address and phone. When they tried to call, nobody answered or they couldn’t get through, so they let me go.

I know now how stupid it was to walk across the runway, but at the time I was just a dorky pre-teen kid with black BCD (birth control device) plastic glasses with the temple piece taped on.

Back in the Seventies, I worked on the flight deck of the USS JFK, and we had a guy who got sucked into the intake of an F-14 Tomcat. He was under the plane doing something, stepped out right in front of the left intake and stood up with his back to it, and went right in. (I was on deck at the time, but didn’t see it, only saw the commotion.)

The pilot saw him go in supine (facing the sky) head first, and immediately shut the engines down, which saved the guy’s life. However, he broke his neck when he hit the cone on the compressor section of the TF-30 engine.

They flew him off the ship on a COD as I recall, and I did see them take him across the flight deck on a stretcher with corpsmen and an IV bag. We were told later he was a quadriplegic. Sad.

They took the engine out of the plane and were sending it off to be repaired, and I saw it in the hangar bay before they put it inside the shipping container. You could see holes in the outside of the compressor section where tools had been sucked out of his tool pouch and gone right through the engine leaving ragged holes behind.

Great stories! Thanks for sharing.

When I was in the Air Force at RAF Lakenheath, England the F-4s we had would sometimes take off in the manner you describe. After a phased maintenance the base QC test pilot, a Capt. Anderson, would take off as you described. Then he’d put the plane through its paces including a supersonic run out over the North Sea. I liked to watch the takeoffs too.

Later, after the Air Force, I worked as a software engineer and would go around sometimes to the big aircraft manufacturers. One day I was in Fort Worth, TX at General Dynamics (now Lockheed) where they made the F-16s. They wanted me to come in kind of late (10AM) and when I did an F-16 took off (alone) and did incredible maneuvers that would be much too dangerous for an airshow. Due to the time, I seemed to be the only one around, so I got my private little show. I think maybe it was a new plane, just off the assembly line, and the pilot was putting it through its paces to make sure everything was right before handing it off to the customer.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.