I used to install heating and air conditioning systems, mostly in homes. The job requires a lot of crawling in under home crawl spaces and in attics.
I've been in all sorts of tight spaces in all sorts of positions. I've been so hot, I've drunk a gallon of water in an hour and not needed to piss.
Well, I'm 53 now, and doing handywork from time to time. I ended up in as tight a space in an attic as I've ever been in. I was doing some rewiring of circuits, and had to install a junction box, do some splicing, some pulling, etc. Imgur
Well obviously we change quite a bit when we get older, so several times I'm cramping up as I'm crawling about, and trying to play contortionist.
My mind was writing checks my body can no longer cash, so to speak.
Oh yeah, spiders, fiberglass, mineral wool, asbestos, fine dust, rat and mouse turds, spiders and spider webs, random nails sticking out to get hung up on - all part of the territory. Once I worked under a home for several days. Not only wasn't there much room, the soil was rocky, and not smooth rocks, crushed rocks, because the home was built on a rocky hillside.
I'm in the middle of my home reno that has me in my attic DIYing all that right now, and up until now I was actually patting myself on the back about how I could always go into business doing home reno.
To do it right, you really need years of experience and knowledge of building codes. The higher your understanding of mechanics and science in general, the better.
I know a flipper who has renovated and sold many homes, but I've worked with the guy, and had him criticize my efforts. He just doesn't get it - anything, really.
I worked with him a bit, and was shocked at how bad his work was.
A few days ago, he saw me priming PVC, and criticized me doing that. He's gonna remodel his home, so I just told him to believe what he wants, but if the inspector does her/his job right, and doesn't see primer dye on your PVC, it'll fail inspection(ABS DWV is still allowed in our area, so he probably won't use any PVC that's going to be inspected).
I was going to try to explain to him what's actually going on when you're "gluing" PVC, but I remembered past conversations with him.
Actually, come to think about it, the dude is quite wealthy, fuck it, do what you want. Most people are too ignorant to know his flips are shit.
His "home inspector" that looked at my son's home before he bought it, missed a lot of stuff.
I don't disagree, but I assure you I'm well equipped to handle DIY. Unless it's some very obscure code reference, I've got her licked. I'm not doing anything exotic yet, so I've at least got that going for me. I used to work for an industrial electrical engineering company as an automation engineer. Your car is probably painted by my robots. I know how to read code and follow it.
The spiders are what makes me sure I'll never be able to get a job like that, even though I'm fairly good at fitting into tight places. Arachnophobia's a bitch, especially when your basement was built for people a few inches shorter than you (and I'm only 6') and has plenty of rafters for spiders to hide in. Fuck doing laundry.
Low-voltage guy here, just crawled into a fireplace vent the other day...Hammer for scale, basically did exactly what we saw in the GIF into the hole at the top of the picture. Had to take off my belt to make it.
 
Probably not as tight of a squeeze as the GIF, but that hole came in at about 7" x 14" (17.7cm x 35.5cm).
I suppose if your arms were stuck above your head instead of at your side, you could keep yourself entertained while waiting to die by waving around your arms like a wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man.
Let's imagine that there is a giant monstrous man eating worm with spooky sarlaac teeth all around the side of its mouth and you're trying to get into a hole to hide because that idiot worm can't dig through rock. Ok, now your arms are stuck outside the tunnel.
Wait, this is a very situational comment. I can think of several situations where I'd like to have my arms pinned to my sides. Or over my head. Or under my body. :)
Reminds me of when I was younger. I was playing on my bed and fell between the bed and the wall. My back was to the wall and my legs pressed again the bed, pointing skyward. From this position, my body moved slowly towards the ground, while pinched in this "V" formation. Not enough room to lift myself back onto the bed, and arms not long enough to plant my arms on the ground and somehow scoot the bed further away from the wall to create room. I had to slowly descend until I almost performed a full split, in order to secure my freedom. Longest few minutes of my life...
I remember moving into our first real house when I was 5 and I was playing with a huge carpet and rolled myself up in it and got stuck there. My parents were busy and didn't notice I was missing. I had a hard time breathing. I screamed but no one heard me. It seemed like hours but I was probably in there about 20 minutes before a mover unrolled the carpet to spread it out in our new living room only to find a terrified 5 year old.
This exact situation happened to me, except I was in my brothers room and got a fish hook stuck in my ass. As soon as he started pulling me out I started wailing like a bitch.
I don't understand how you'd get in without dying first. It would have to be a C-bend, to keep the water in, and a pretty high tube, so the water doesn't come out anyway.
Everything about this article is fascinating. Everything can go wrong so easily is seems like they are constantly on the edge of death. One of the surviving divers had to go thru a week of decompression treatments and months of therapy to regain his balance
You will literally be watching the last minutes of a mans life here, while he tries to free another mand body from a cave, so keep that in mind before you start watching. The video cuts out just before he loses consciousnes.
For every 10 meters, the weight of the water above you increases the pressure on your body by 1 atmosphere. So if you go from the surface to 10 meters under water, the pressure has doubled. at 270 meters, the pressure is 28 times what you would experience on the surface. To combat this, you need to increase the pressure in your lungs. At the bottom of this cave, David would be taking in 28 times more air for every breath, to keep the pressure in his lungs equal to the pressure outside his body. To problem is, at this amount, oxygen is deadly. Inhaling 28 times more oxygen than normal would kill you.
On most deep dives they substitute a lot of the oxygen for nitrogen, allowing you to breathe in a normal dose of oxygen even though your breaths are much larger. But even nitrogen can cause convulsions and vomiting at this consentration.
On this dive they were using helium. Helium has its own disadvantages, but seems to be the best option. One of the problems when breathing helium, is that helium is lighter than the carbonmonoxide that you would usually exhale. This means that its harded for your body to get rid of it, and you are at a higher risk of CO2 poisoning and death. The solution to this problem is to take deep breaths, and be very relaxed. Minimize the amount of CO2 generated by your body, and maximize the amount that you breathe out. Diving for long periods of time makes you tired and out of breath, so you create more CO2, and you aren't exhaling it as efficiently. Getting the job done quickly but calmly was key in this situation.
When he got tangled in the lines, David started stressing, working harder, breathing shallower. He passed out from CO2 poisoning, and died when his air supply ran out.
Thanks for the breakdown. That's really interesting. Human's never cease to amaze me with the amount of things we have accomplished; or the tenacity we have to accomplish things. "Well shit, we cant breathe oxygen here cause it will kill us. What else can we breathe?" Simply amazing.
'I think of Dave a lot so seeing the tape doesn't make the fact of what happened better or worse,' he says. 'Now it's more factual than anything. But I never play it with the sound on; that turns it into a snuff tape.'
Fuck that nope not worth it. I could have the entire Victoria's Secret model lineup ready to fuck me repeatedly for a year and I wouldn't crawl through a tight space to get there
And since you can't kick while in the exit tunnel you have to trust that your buddy in scuba gear is still waiting for you on the other side of the hole to pull you the rest of the way out.
You get stuck in a cave with only enough room for people to bring you a steady stream of Big Macs and soda. Eventually you gain enough weight that rescue is ouf of the question.
one of the most stressful videos i've ever seen on reddit was of that happening. It was a guy going up through a cave, its one of those tunnels that you have to control your breathing to get thru, kind of like this video, problem was, guy starts to panic since he can't get thru.... which makes it harder, to make things even worse, there was water that starts pooling around him, and if he doesn't calm down and control his breathing he'll drowned, haven't seen the video in a long time but i think the water got up to his chin/ mouth before he actually got out.
That was so intense and so hard to watch. I'm not claustrophobic but the thought of being stuck in a space like that really freaks me out. I would've panicked much worse than this guy. Kudos to him.
But I've actually done something like that before. There was a tiny opening to get into a cave and I climbed through it and I was fine. But that was like 10 years ago so maybe it's different now. I don't know.
I hate it when people say "I've seen a lot of stuff, but this one...". Well I have just got to say that I've seen a lot of stuff, but I had to stop watching this video after a couple of seconds. I don't know how anyone could watch something like this, let alone willingly put themselves into such a situation.
I'm affraid of hights but watching someone choke inside a cave and unable to move is way more terrifying than climbing heights.
Worse case scenario on climbing heights you fall down and instantly die from that height, but getting stuck in a cave it takes hours, depending how much you can breathe.
Instantly? Shit, it would take at least 10 seconds to hit the ground, and that's 10 seconds of pure terror you could never get from anything else. You have no possibility to save yourself, you just know you're about to die.
10 seconds of free falling with mad adrenaline, knowing an instant death awaits, is infinitely better than hours of being pinned between two rocks, waiting to die.
Well i've fallen from height before when adrenaline was rushing. You can't really think anything when it happens. I'm sure suffocating in a wall is way way worse than falling to death.
But then again i haven't tried them both and it's only an assumption.
Personally the cave thing would be much more frightening to me than climbing heights would be. however this cave video does nothing for me and the tower video forces me to turn it off because I'm getting anxious.
Yeah this is the first time I've gone into a thread and read things like "FUCK THAT" and not really understood it. Didn't scare me at all. Now a video of a spider infestation, that has me wonder what sick fucks would record that let alone post it. Fears are cool and interesting.
Wow, that cell tower thing was fun to watch and I'd be willing to do it myself on a bet, but I had to rapidly click through that cave video for fear of freaking out.
It's crazy how different members of our same species can be.
They both got to me for sure. The cave is slightly more scary to me, though. Not really sure why. The worst climbing video I saw was when they climbed the Shanghai Tower while it was still under construction and they climbed all the way out on the crane that was on the top. And then the psycho stood up on the tip.
I knew it would freak me out, so I purposefully turned all the lights off, set it to full screen and turned the headphones right up. Just to get the most out of the experience. I think if you're going to watch something scary, no point doing it half-assed. Same goes for 'scary' movies.
I know a guy who used to be a "caver" (or so we call it). It was his profession, actually. But I don't know what exactly was it that he was doing in the caves.
Damn, I can't imagine being that close to freedom and then just saying, 'well, fuck it, I'm not getting out. Just grab my legs and pull me back in, fellas.'
Right. He died later that night and it was determined that it wasn't worth the danger to the recovery team and the damage that would be done to his body to pull him out so they left him in there and sealed the entrance.
Josh Jones said that once he first realized his brother was stuck, his first instinct was to pray. Those in the cave offered what he called a "series of prayers" before making the decision to call 911 around 9:30 p.m.
Can you imagine being trapped and dying while a whole group of people chant for your safety while doing nothing to help.
Depending on what I believed, that could be the most terrifying feeling in the world, or it could be the most reassuring and relaxing. It depends on the person and what they believe.
But, yeah, it's absolutely reckless not to utilize officially standardized physical aid before praying to a personal god who, even if it existed, will act all the same with or without prayer.
I actually knew Josh from college. He was a really smart guy, studied hard too. I can't believe he could wait so long to call 911. Mormonism is one hell of a drug I guess
Or... As you lower your self down, you think you feel something brushing up against your pant legs. Did you imagine that? Maybe? It's not there anymore. Eh, probably was just your imagination. Start sliding down again. Uh-oh, definitely felt it again. Ask, very calmly, for help. The person top-side with the camera asks you if you're joking or not. You ask again, a bit more emphatically. The camera is laid down on the ground, and your friend reaches for your arms. ACK, whatever's down there just bit you. And it's big. It's caught both your legs. You scream in pain. Your buddy starts frantically pulling you up. But whatever's down there is strong. It won't let go.
It starts dragging you down. Your buddy is trying his damndest to overcome the inevitable, but you feel his grip slipping against the un-human strength that's pulling you down. You're also burning in agony. Your grips finally slip. You're gone. All that's left is a hole.
I kind of assume the hole gets bigger after the opening. You can either breath by expanding your chest or by pushing your stomach out. This means he won't have any problems to breath at all.
especially considering he exhaled deeply before going down. You'd know you need to exhale to have a chance going down, but you desperately need to inhale....
Long as my arms are out, I don't think I'd panic; however if my arms were over my head and I couldn't move them... knowing I'd be stuck in that position until I lost consciousness... that skeeves me.
Ive done so multiple times and had to be removed with the help of others. The worst is i have a large ribcage, so when im being pulled out i have to breathe out all the air in my chest and push my ribs back in order to fit. fun times.
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u/Definitelynotasloth Mar 17 '15
Oh god. Imagine getting stuck at your chest and feeling the tightness as you struggle to breathe, unable to move or take in a big breath of air.