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Tag: Collapse

  • Ridgway, Pennsylvania Bridge Collapses Day After Anniversary of Other Famous Collapse [Pic]

    In Ridgway, Pennsylvania today, three workers were injured when a bridge collapsed. One of the men had to be evacuated by helicopter for medical attention. The bridge was part of a rebuild project, and had already been in use for 103 years. The portion of the bridge that collapsed was slated for destruction when it fell.

    One worker was operating an excavator and two others were walking on the structure when it collapsed.

    According to local news sources, there were no injuries to the general public, and there was no traffic on the Ridgway bridge at the time. However, about 5,500 vehicles do use the bridge daily.

    “The excavator was sitting in the middle of the bridge, and two guys were walking across the bridge, and it just collapsed,” the local fire chief told The Associated Press.

    This bridge collapse in Pennsylvania echoes the memory of another, memorialized only yesterday. On June 17, 1958, seventy-nine workers were working on a new bridge in British Columbia when the bridge collapsed in the middle of construction. Eighteen workers died that day, as well as a scuba diver aiding in rescue and recovery efforts. That collapse plunged workers 175 feet to the water below, many of them harnessed to heavy equipment.

    Country music star Jimmy Dean memorialized the British Columbia collapse with his song “Steel Men.” That bridge was named Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing in honor of those men who died.

    The Ridgway bridge in today’s collapse incident spans Elk Creek in Elk County about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    Local news also has updated that all workers on the Ridgway bridge are out of harm’s way and no one is believed to be trapped in the collapse.

  • Rich Peverley Collapses During Dallas Stars Game

    At the 13:37 mark of the first period in yesterday’s Columbus Blue Jackets vs. Dallas Stars hockey game, play was halted by the officials due to Rich Peverley, a Centre for the Dallas Stars, collapsing on the bench.

    The scene as it unfolded live was one of panic and deep concern. When the players on the Dallas Stars bench first noticed that Peverley had collapsed, their initial reaction was to beat their sticks on the boards to draw the attention of the officials. However, when that attempt did not work (most likely due to the overall noise of the arena), the players took to a more desperate attempt to halt the game – rushing onto the ice in waves to force the stoppage.

    “When he dropped, it was red alert. Don’t worry about the game. It was about getting the doctors. The players don’t want to play, and I don’t want to coach the team right now,” stated Stars coach Lindy Ruff. “I was scared.”

    The Dallas Stars organization had great reason to be concerned. Peverley, 31 years of age, had a medical procedure before the NHL season began to correct a pre-existing heart condition. The procedure forced Peverley to miss the preseason training camp and the Stars’ first game of the season.

    “We monitor him closely for a different type of arrhythmia he has. He does have a pre-existing condition, and the condition — a normal quivering of the heart that does not allow him to send blood to places where he needs to, in his brain and heart,” reported a member of the emergency medicine team at UT Southwestern, Dr. Gil Salazar.

    Peverley was moved by a player to the tunnel for immediate treatment. Luckily, Peverley responded almost immediately, which Dr. Salazar states is a positive sign: “We provided oxygen for him. We started an IV. We did chest compressions on him and defibrillated him, provided some electricity to bring a rhythm back to his heart, and that was successful with one attempt, which is very reassuring. As soon as we treated him, he regained consciousness. He was able to tell me where he was.”

    Not only was Peverley able to tell Dr. Salazar where he was, but was also cognizant enough to want to get back out on the ice:

    Despite Peverley’s want and will to continue playing, his teammates were not of the same persuasion.

    There’s nobody in there that wants to play hockey right now, and I think everybody understands that when you’ve witnessed what they had to witness, and that’s their teammate. And that’s the right place to be. That’s the right emotion to have. They’re not doing very good, and I wouldn’t expect them to be,” stated Ruff.

    Due to the reluctance of players and coaches to resume the game, the NHL has decided to suspend play and postpone the game to a later date.

    In the meantime, NHL players, coaches, and fans must wonder why the NHL has allowed Peverley to continue playing with such a dangerous pre-existing condition. With the NFL upping its attention to player safety, one would think that the NHL, perhaps an even more physical sport than the NFL, would follow suit in light of all of the scientific information gathered by the recent focus on sports injuries. One can only hope that Peverley’s condition will be more fully assessed before he is allowed back on the ice and brings the potential of a similar event occurring.

    Image via YouTube

  • Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    The New York Times reported that a recent study of pollen may explain the sudden collapse of what were, at the time, highly successful civilizations like the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Hittites.

    3200 years in the distant past, Tel Aviv was a major trading center in Israel, Ramses II ruled over a vast Egyptian empire, and many other cultures from Mycenaean Greece to Canaan engaged in trade and commerce along the Mediterranean Sea. 150 years later, every empire would be either dead or a mere fragment of their former glory.

    What caused this sudden collapse, until now, was the subject of much historical debate. A variety of theories cast blame on bloody warfare, unpredictable earthquakes, or perhaps one of a variety of plagues.

    But today, a study conducted in Tel Aviv and Bonn, Germany on fossilized pollen and published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University is suggesting that between the years of 1250 and 1100 B.C.E., a terrible drought took place that wiped out several civilizations.

    The new theory is due, in no small part, to massive advances in climate science that permitted the researchers to make such a precise conclusion. Similar studies that examine long-term processes like pollen buildup often require analysis of strata roughly 500 years apart, but this particular study analyzed strata at 40-year intervals as opposed to 500, which Professor Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv says is the most precise resolution of study yet performed in the region.

    Finkelstein and another professor, Steve Weiner from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, had previously received a grant from the European Research Council to attempt a reconstruction of ancient Israel.

    A Tel Aviv University pollen researcher, Dafna Langgut, was brought in alongside Professor Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany to conduct the climate-side of the research. The entire project was initiated in 2010, and has taken the full three years to complete.

    The research team had to extract nearly 60 feet of soil core samples from the Sea of Galilee, going deep enough to reach sediments from the last 9,000 years. They performed the same extraction in the Dead Sea.

    Their final conclusion: the Mediterranean area suffered a sharp decrease in trees like oaks, pines, carobs, and olive trees. Since olive trees were essential for local cultivation, the experts believe repeated droughts were required to achieve this result. The consequences would have been apocalyptic, particularly for city-states like Megiddo.

    In the historical record, the first hint of the problems to come was a letter from a Hittite queen to Ramses II circa-1250 B.C.E., which read, “I have no grain in my lands.”

    “Understanding climate is key to understanding history,” Finkelstein added. “The authors of the Bible knew very well the value of precipitation and the calamity that may be inflicted on people by drought.”

    Read the full Times piece here.

    [Image via a YouTube lecture on the Bronze Age]

  • New Jersey Boy Dies After Sand Tunnel Collapses

    Playing in the sand seems like such an innocent and completely harmless way for children to spend their time at the beach. However, it only takes one mistake for things to take a serious turn for the worse. Such is the case of a 12 year-old New Jersey boy who was tunneling through the sand on Tuesday, only to have his creation collapse on top of him. When paramedics finally managed to pull him free, the child was already unconscious.

    In an effort to save his life, the boy was placed in the pediatric intensive care unit at Monmouth Medical Center. Sadly, he was pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, there have been 31 such deaths over the span of twenty years. CBS News reports that similar incidents — 16 to be exact — occurred between 1990 and 2010.

    “At least once a day, lifeguards have to stop someone from digging a hole too deep,” a California lifeguard explained after an 18-year-old man almost died in a similar sand tunnel collapse. “Holes are a hazard for everyone who uses the beach.”

    Another depressing aspect of this story took place when firetrucks responding to the call first arrived on the scene. While holding his son, a man was struck by an emergency vehicle, knocking both he and his baby to the ground. Although the child was not severely injured in the accident, the man suffered several broken bones.

    Image provided courtesy of NBC New York

  • Dept. of Homeland Security Is Watching You Twitter & Tweet

    If you have a Twitter account, you may have “people” that follow you with what are suspiciously fake accounts. The tell-tale signs are standard: thousands of followers with barely any (if even one) tweets, tweets that contain lots of links and mentions without any real content, an empty profile or very generic (or porn-y) information in the profile. Most likely, they’re bots, automated accounts run by computers that generate comments and follow people – it’s like the spam of the Twitterscape. Here’s an example of someone that followed me recently that I suspect is most likely not a real person:

    You don’t have to scrutinize Ms. Maribel’s information too hard to gather that there is something fishy about this account. I’d wager that those nearly 100 followers of hers are probably also bots and they probably non-Tweet about botty things. These things are everywhere on Twitter. In all seriousness, I don’t think I’ve been followed by a real person on Twitter in months. And although Facebook certainly has its share of phony accounts, Twitter seems to be the more polluted of the two.

    HOWEVER. It turns out that these might not be meaningless bots after all thanks to a new operation from the United States Department of Homeland Security. According to a new report in The Daily Mail, the DHS uses fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to monitor and track people who happen to use “sensitive” words. What kind of sensitive words? Words that despite sounding villainous are actually fairly generic. “The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency.” If the DHS catches someone using any of these words and suspects you might be up to no good, it could mean that ” spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.” Spies! Human to animal virus death recovery! Okay, DHS, you guys are obviously new to The Internet because just about every one of those keywords of yours could also be easily used in the context of sex and if you were familiar at all with this thing called The Internet you’d realize that 98% of it is porn-related. (P.S. – in case you didn’t know, porn includes sex.)

    Not a group to let this trespass of our blessed privacy, everyone on Twitter responded appropriately:

    @Boxer_AF
    Animal Farm    Hello #USA #humantoanimal #outbreak #drill #strain #illegalimmigrant #virus #recovery #deaths #collapse #trojan http://t.co/iVphexbY 2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @SazeracLA
    Chuck Taggart    Drill illegal immigrants infection strain outbreak virus recovery deaths collapse human to animal Trojan. Bring it on, bitches. #DHS #spies 13 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @ShiningService
    Linda Franklin    Dept. of Homeland Security could be watching Facebook & Twitter 4 danger words like ‘virus’, ‘illegal immigrant’ & drill. 1 hour ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto

    @red_red_head
    Red    I’m pretty sure we’re on watch lists anyway, but apparently “drill” is also a word DHS searches on social media… http://t.co/VNfEEVIu 33 minutes ago via Facebook · powered by @socialditto

    @Albatross
    Albatross    Me 1st! illegal immigrant, outbreak, drill, strain, virus, recovery, deaths, collapse, human to animal and trojan http://t.co/rhqsrzeg 18 minutes ago via Digsby · powered by @socialditto

    @nikopeltokangas
    Niko Peltokangas    Human to animal. Infection. Collapse. Outbreak. Illegal immigrants. Please RT! 1 hour ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    So as if the keyword surveillance probably wasn’t muddled with sexy search results already then the noble crusaders of Twitter have undoubtedly thrown a couple more monkey wrenches into the Big Brothery gears of the DHS. At least I hope it has because if not then the combination of my searches on Twitter for their keywords in addition to my use of all of the words in this article will probably be enough for the feds to punch my ticket to Gitmo later today.

  • Boston Red Sox Find No Sympathy on Twitter

    The sports world is buzzing right now with the collapse of the Boston Red Sox and, to a lesser extent, the Atlanta Braves. The thing about the Braves is, the team’s not as polarizing as teams from the Boston market are — does ESPN the Magazine deserve some curse blame here? — and therefore, people aren’t reveling in Atlanta’s failure like the Twitterverse is with the Boston Red Sox.

    Currently, the Red Sox are a trend, but it’s not to commiserate their epic collapse. Instead, the trend, recalls a great moment in Eric Cartman’s history, by celebrating the tear-shedding from the countless many that make up the Red Sox fanbase. I have to wonder what the “show up to work” rate is in the city of Boston today. It’s not hard to imagine over half the city calling in to work on the morning after the Sox’ failure.

    To make matters worse, the Red Sox didn’t give away their Wild Card spot easily. No, they waited until the 9th inning to finish their choking, which only adds to the misery. Holding on that long, only to give it all away at the end? That can’t feel good.

    Whatever the case, it’s advisable that Red Sox fans do not turn to Twitter for moral support, because they won’t find it there. In fact, the reaction is downright brutal, but then again, it’s apparently hard to feel sorry for a fanbase that is perceived as arrogant, whether the moniker is deserved or not. With that, let’s enjoy the Twitter reaction, as many respondents are clearly enjoying the collapse for all its worth.

    The first sums up the mood of the room quite well:

    @drugsdeathdolin
    LGoD    I kinda feel bad for the braves, i dont feel bad for the red sox. 31 minutes ago via txt · powered by @socialditto

    And from there, the hate flows freely:

    @FakeJeter
    Fake Derek Jeter    I like my coffee black, my eggs scrambled, and my Red Sox toasted. 35 minutes ago via UberSocial for BlackBerry · powered by @socialditto

    @marciaherold
    Marcia Herold    Is it possible the power of Boston resided in Tom Brady’s hair? 1 hour ago via TweetCaster for Android · powered by @socialditto

    In case you don’t get the reference, Tom Terrific got his hair cut yesterday. Like the previous tweet, many of these reactions are pretty creative, adding even more value to the trend:

    @baseballcrank
    Dan McLaughlin    “…and that’s how Earl crossed off #423, ‘gave Red Sox fans a sense of entitlement.’” 36 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @FauxJohnMadden
    Faux John Madden    Even LeBron James thinks the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves choked. 10 hours ago via Echofon · powered by @socialditto

    Ouch.

    Remember those New Era commercials that pitted Alec Baldwin against John Krasinski? Folks on Twitter sure didn’t forget:

    @ElVerdugo5
    Kevin Pozuelos    Red Sox fans…remember this commercial in April? lmfaoooooo http://t.co/83UWXGli 38 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Even Boston fans got in on the fun as well:

    @MetroBOS
    MetroBoston    NOOOOOOOOOO! http://t.co/VNvuEcFx Red Sox! Why?????? 🙁 42 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @jonfrederick
    Jon Frederick    Sweet, I get to tear up my ALDS tickets. Thanks, Red Sox. 42 minutes ago via Seesmic · powered by @socialditto

    Is this a case of the Red Sox losing the numbers game, or is it the revenge of Bill Buckner?

    @ESPN_Numbers
    Numbers Never Lie    #NumberOfTheAM: .259 = Red Sox finished 7-20, which is their lowest winning percentage in any month since Aug. of 1964 46 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @VYPUR
    Tommy    That episode was great “@jdubs88: Someone (forget who, not me) noted that Red Sox went 6-18 after Buckner episode of Curb. #BabyCatching” 43 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    And then, there’s this. Not really sure what to add here, but one hopes this account is done in jest:

    @johnhelbling95
    John Helbling    Red Sox miss playoffs in dramatic fashion…possibly because of their support of homosexuality?
    http://t.co/wQjGOyq8 45 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    Considering the rest of the content on the linked account, it’s not a joke. Some people really feel that way. Bonus: they can vote, too. Do with that information what you will. Aside from the occasional self-serving tweet, most of the reaction is reveling in the failure. Even BuzzFeed got in on the fun as did CNBC’s Darren Rovell, who posted an image of this nifty t-shirt:

    Darren Rovell's photo Guys @smackapparel make Red Sox "Choke" shirt
    Darren Rovell on WhoSay

    Is it wrong to revel in the failure of others? Apparently not, especially if it’s Red Sox nation we’re talking about.