NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 13
Dispatches Oddities
HUH?
RECENT HEADSCRATCHERS
FROM
THE WORLD OF FIRE
AND LIFE SAFETY
RUN FOR COVER
With a name like the Rocket
City Trash Pandas, what
could go wrong? Turns out,
quite a bit.
In August, a minor league
baseball game being played
at Toyota Field in Madison,
Alabama, took a frightening
turn when fireworks were
mistakenly shot into the
crowd instead of up in the air.
The stadium is home to the
Rocket City Trash Pandas, the
AA affiliate of the Los Angeles
Angels, whose mascot
was described by the New
York Times last year as " a
garbage-can-flying raccoon
astronaut named Sprocket
[who] has captivated baseball's
lower levels. "
A security guard who was
struck by an errant projectile
was taken to the hospital with
minor injuries, but no other
injuries were reported. Trash
Pandas' management blamed
the mishap on Roman candles
that had been set up upside
down. When asked by reporters
shortly after the incident
if the pre-game fireworks
show was still on for the following
game, the answer was
a resounding yes-just without
the upside-down
Roman candles.
" We're going to take
some precautions, " Garrett
Fahrmann, the Trash
Pandas' general manager,
told CBS News 19 in
Huntsville, Alabama.
LONG, STRANGE TRIP
A Chinese man was only trying to spend his Sunday harvesting
pine nuts from his hydrogen balloon, as one does. But when
the balloon's tether snapped, the 40-something man took an
unexpected two-day, 200-mile balloon ride across Heilongjiang
Province in northeastern China before landing unscathed.
The man, identified in news accounts only by his surname,
Hu, had been harvesting nuts with a partner using a balloon, a
practice that is illegal. When the tether gave way, the partner
jumped to the ground, leaving Hu to face the wild blue
yonder all alone.
A day into his journey, rescuers were able to contact Hu via
cellphone, the Associated Press reported. They instructed him
to slowly let the gas out of the balloon until he came back down
to Earth. Hu and the balloon had almost crossed into Russia by
the time he landed.
" Hu was in good health, " AP reported, " apart from a pain in his
lower back, possibly from standing the entire time he was in the air. "
The situation was not in
fact an attempt to make the
world's largest serving of baba
ghanoush, we quipped, but
instead resulted from a leak in
a transport truck.
Well, here we go again.
And let us start by saying that
nobody was trying to make a
giant bowl of chicken Alfredo.
In August, a crash involving
SLIP SLIDIN' AWAY
In the Oddities section of our
Fall 2022 issue, we reported
on a roadway spill of 150
gallons of tahini that challenged
first responders in
New Jersey over the summer.
a tractor-trailer truck left an
estimated 150,000 tomatoes
scattered across a stretch
of Interstate 80 north of San
Francisco. Just like the old
slipping-on-a-banana-peel
joke goes, the skins of the
traffic-smashed tomatoes
soon proved problematic,
causing " a chain reaction
of crashes, " according to
the New York Times. " Those
tomato skins, man. Once they
hit the asphalt, it's like walking
on ice, " a police officer told
the newspaper.
A day later, an overturned
truck smeared Alfredo sauce
along hundreds of feet of
Interstate 55 in Memphis. At
first, the accident smelled
great- " like Olive Garden, " the
New York Times reported-but
that quickly changed under the
late-August Tennessee sun. " It
was just not a great recipe for a
highway full of Alfredo sauce, "
one local TV reporter said.
Apparently, trucks dumping
foodstuffs and other items
onto roadways is common.
There's even a website,
truckspills.com, that is entirely
dedicated to such events.
Other spills this year have
involved beer, wine, grapes,
and-wait for it-lab monkeys.
A truck carrying 100 longtailed
macaques collided with
a dump truck in Pennsylvania,
sending about a dozen cages
tumbling; four of the creatures
escaped but were later located
and euthanized. In less grave
news, another load of tomatoes
was spilled on a major
California highway less than a
week after the I-80 spill.
NFPA .ORG/JOURNAL * NFPA JOURNAL | 13
https://www.nfpa.org/journal
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - Winter 2022
Contents
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 1
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 2
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 3
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - Contents
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 5
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 6
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 7
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 8
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 9
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 10
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 11
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 12
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 13
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 14
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 15
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 16
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 17
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 18
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 19
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