It took rescue crews two hours to pull Wyatt Kauffman to safety on Tuesday after falling off a ledge at the popular tourist site’s North Rim.
Wyatt told a local television station he had fallen while moving out of the way so people could take pictures.
He said he had been squatting down and holding onto a rock with one hand when he lost his grip and started to fall back.
“After the fall, I don’t remember anything after that,” he told Phoenix television station KPNX while in hospital.
Wyatt was pulled to safety by a team from the Grand Canyon National Park, who rappelled down a cliff after deciding a helicopter rescue would not be possible due to the terrain.
“We’re extremely grateful for the work of everyone,” said Wyatt’s father, Brian Kauffman, who was home in North Dakota at the time of the accident.
Wyatt was pulled to safety by a team from the Grand Canyon National Park, who rappelled down a cliff after deciding a helicopter rescue would not be possible due to the terrain.
If this were a plot point in a movie, I would have called it a contrived excuse to have the heroes scale a rock wall.
Regulate nicotine. It serves no purpose besides addicting people to a product. Once people are capable of making a real choice, the problem will become much less severe. Over time, it might even disappear completely.
Regardless of the health effects, addiction (and related expenses) can cost you hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. People go to counseling, join support groups, and buy nicotine patches to try and quit.
I say “try” because on average, former cigarette smokers had to try to quit several times before they were successful. Many former smokers say that quitting was extremely hard, maybe even the hardest thing they’ve done. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the same is true with vaping.
I don’t like nicotine because it’s used to manipulate and take advantage of people. The product/delivery method is irrelevant.
The delivery method for vaping is water vapor. The delivery method for cigarettes is to wrap the nicotine in poison and then burn it. And you see no difference?
Of course I see the difference. The fact that cigarettes are dangerous to your health is so screamingly obvious that I didn’t even think that was something we needed to tell each other.
My point is that nicotine makes it much harder to stop vaping or smoking once you decide you want to. That’s what I meant when I said “the product/delivery method is irrelevant”, and why I started my comment with “regardless of the health effects”.
It doesn’t matter how the nicotine gets into your system. It messes with you anyway. Regulating specific products is like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole. The industry will keep finding different ways to get you hooked.
We’ve tried regulating tobacco, so they found a nicotine delivery system that doesn’t rely on tobacco. Let’s attack the addiction problem at the source - regulate the nicotine. That way, when they come up with something new (like an energy drink or something) the existing laws still apply. The slow-moving government doesn’t have to play catch up. Consumers stay protected.
Nicotine addiction is not a PROBLEM though, no more than caffeine addiction. The problem is when the only legal way to get caffeine is by a cocktail of red bull and arsenic.
Nicotine is not the issue. The delivery method is the whole problem.
I think comparing vaping to drinking water is disingenuous - it is not needed and has active harms. Just because one thing is less harmful than another doesn't mean we can't regulate both heavily.
It does mean that, unless we are stupid or have ulterior motives, we should not regulate them equally heavily.
Besides, the science shows vaping is nearly harmless. I think that, again unless we are stupid, we should not be regulating it "heavily" at all. Just ban it for under-18s. Enforce that ban. That's all.
It should be regulated at least as much as food though don’t you think? Not just ban it for under 18s but specify what can or can’t go into a vape product.
Otherwise you’ll get companies using cheap but dangerous to inhale substances over more expensive safer substances that do the same job.
The science isn’t fully decided on vapes - AFAIK the PG/VG and nicotine are relatively harmless (though nicotine does carry some heart/stroke risks) but the flavours are generally only tested for safety when taken orally, not when atomised and inhaled. Flavourless vape juice is therefore probably safe, though hardly anybody sells it, it’s kinda unpleasant, and it does still carry some health risks.
Let me just rephrase what you said. Instead of "the science isn't fully decided", which paints an incorrect picture, let's rather say "of everything they've tested in a typical legal vape, everything is essentially harmless. Some of the components haven't been tested."
Saying "the science isn't fully decided" implies "eh, maybe it's dangerous, maybe it's not, 50/50". That's not at all the case. It's almost certainly all harmless. Just very addictive.
That’s not true. “The science isn’t fully decided” means that long-terms effects are extremely hard to measure, it literally takes decades. The amount of liquids of different flavors is so big that you can’t realistically test them all. Different flavors require different chemicals, you can get the same taste with different chemicals too. Yes, basic liquid is probably less harmful than cigarettes, but even for that there’s not enough data to say that this is a scientific fact.
This article is a classic example of North Atlantic propaganda writing.
Cambodia remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, 48 years after the end of its brutal civil war.
Passive voice. It’s not that Cambodia was mined by someone, it just remains mined. Who mined it? Well, it apparently owns a brutal civil war, so presumably it mined itself?
It was a civil war rooted in the French colonialism in the area giving way to US dominance (like in Vietnam) in the USA’s campaign to encircle China with nuclear military bases. Yes, Cambodians did mine their own country and they used Chinese mines to do it. And they did it because they didn’t have many other choices when facing the US military and the puppet regimes of European colonialism.
Even worse than the historical context around the mining, there’s literally no context for anything. Are landmines a thing of the past? Absolutely not. The US is still using landmines despite 90% of the world signing a treaty to stop using them because of how they kill so many innocent people for decades. In fact, Cambodia is one of the classic examples of why the treaty was signed. But the US still uses them. How is that not relevant to a story about landmines in Cambodia? Because it’s a BBC article.
But the layers of propaganda keep going. Not only is Cambodia one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, it’s one of the world’s most heavily bombed countries. And these bombs, especially the unexploded cluster bombs, remain throughout the country as well, killing innocents decades later. And why is Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries in the world? The USA. So we’ve got a story about a high school finding land mines in it, a statement that Cambodia is passively one of the most mined countries in the world, but zero accountability, except to say “civil war” so it allows ignorant readers to imagine it was all Cambodians.
And as if that context isn’t enough to add, Cambodia is but ONE of the 30 countries the US has bombed, and it ranks among the top bombed countries in the history of the world along with North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. So, a story about Cambodia have unexploded ordinance in a school makes no mention of the context of unexploded ordinance in general, the basic history of who is responsible for the conflict (France, US) and how Cambodia is not exceptional for the region nor for the time period. None of that context matters, I guess.
But since we’re here, let’s add some more context. The bombings of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all came AFTER the USA nuked 2 civilian cities in Japan while in the middle of negotiations. Literally in the middle of negotiations, Japan is sending a message to the negotiators, the USA receives the message asking for dialog on particular points, and in response the USA nukes civilians in the world’s only ever nuclear attack. This is the context that precedes the US making 4 other countries the most bombed countries in the world. But, unlike in Japan, the US didn’t use nukes in these theaters. Instead, they left literally going on 50 years of unexploded ordinance in these countries that continues to kill people. And in Vietnam they brought in genocidal chemical warfare by developing and deploying Agent Orange. Agent Orange is a defoliant, and the US deployed it to literally destroy all of the leaves in massive chunks of rain forest because they claimed it would help them fight the Vietnamese better if the Vietnamese couldn’t hide in the trees. Well, turns out Agent Orange is so toxic that it still causes massive numbers of terrible disfiguring birth defects, stillbirths, and virulent cancers - not as bad but with echoes of the radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are literal multi-generation mass murder campaigns.
I wish that was the end of the context, but instead what we see is the USA continue this centuries-long genocidal mass murder program in Yugoslavia where it directed NATO to drop Depleted Uranium bombs in a densely developed European country. That region also has multiple generations of terrible birth defect, still birth, and cancers many many times the incident rate for countries in the region that were not bombed with nuclear waste. The US then proceeded to kill a million Iraqis, in a conflict where it used white phosphorous which burned thousands of innocent people to death much like the use of napalm in Vietnam, and where it used depleted uranium rounds, much more prolifically. The birth defects, stillbirths, and cancers in Iraq are sky high, again a multi-generational mass murder campaign.
Apologists can pretend that the US didn’t understand what it was doing to the Vietnamese or the Japanese, that the weapons were new and hadn’t been tested, and the long term effects just weren’t understood. I don’t think that’s true. But even if it were, Henry Kissinger was the architect of what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia, and he’s still alive today. They sent him to talk with China recently. You don’t get to say the US didn’t understand the effects of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, landmines, and cluster munitions in the conflicts it created in Yugoslavia, Iraq, other parts of Africa, etc. You don’t get to say the US is a net force for good when it does these things consciously, knowingly, systematically, and against a global cry for peace and for deescalation.
This is the context in which an article is written detailing some landmines found in a Cambodian high school. Cambodia remains the most mined country in the world after a devastating 48-year civil war.
Among his injuries were nine broken vertebrae, a ruptured spleen, broken hand and a collapsed lung.
Jesus. 13 year old survives 100 foot fall, meanwhile I stretched too far to reach some chips in the highest parts of the cupboard and now I can’t look right.
Kids are made basically out of rubber. Adults however… Have you ever seen a rubber band that’s been sitting in a drawer for like 5 years without use? Yeah, kind of a similar thing.
Among his injuries were nine broken vertebrae, a ruptured spleen, broken hand and a collapsed lung. [...] "We're just lucky we're bringing our kid home [to North Dakota] in a car in the front seat instead of in a box."
... I'm not sure that's the best way to transport someone who was just diagnosed with nine broken vertebrae.
I was thinking there must be younger siblings in the back, so he had to travel in front. But now I realize both parents were there, so that means one of the parents is in the back seat…
I think they meant that they will drive him home in the front seat. The article seems to be written within the same week as the accident, I can’t imagine he’s been released from the hospital yet.
Damn. I remember looking at a book at the Grand canyon rim souvenir shop that documented all the hundreds of people who have died by falling into the Grand canyon over the many decades. It’s kind of a sobering reality when you stand right on the edge and look down hundreds of feet and realize that it wouldn’t take much for your life to end right then and there.
Somewhere a photographer from 20 years ago has a photo of me standing right at the edge probably of this exact same cliff. I still can’t believe I did that as I have a severe fear of heights, lol.
Hope the kid gets better and gains a healthy fear of heights after this.
Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. Maybe it should be required reading—or at least required skimming—for anyone walking around out there. So many dumb-dumbs with cameras trying to get selfies on the edge, or just wanting to look over…
I remember reading that book. My takeaway from it was that if I go hiking in there, I’m taking a friend.
One of the major risk factors for dying out there was if you were a guy going out there by yourself. I’d bet they would all be alive today if they just had someone else there to tell them their idea was stupid, and sometimes you just need to say it out loud before you realize its dumb halfway through explaining it
I always have this harrowing thought every time I was there (I lived in AZ, it was a once-every-few-years sort of affair). I have a memory of my Dad posing for a picture there, right where there’s an ankle-high wall leading to certain doom. He didn’t fall, but it wouldn’t take much and it gives me such Call of the Void vibes looking at that photo.
“We pick up remains and they fall apart,” said Maui County police chief John Pelletier on Saturday, four days after a massive wildfire tore downhill through dry brush and grass and engulfed the island’s western edge.
Dozens of survivors shared their stories of escape and loss with the BBC, helping to piece together a more complete picture of the tragedy that unfolded on Tuesday, when fires moving at a mile per minute consumed the town.
One thing seemed to unite their accounts: residents say they had no official warning before they fled for their lives, raising painful questions about the effectiveness of the emergency response and whether more people could have been saved.
For Tee Dang, a tourist from Kansas, the first clue that her vacation had taken a deadly turn came in the form of an Airbnb host barrelling past her door and telling her family to run.
At 4:29pm, Maui’s emergency management agency had publicly announced perhaps its first evacuation order, writing on X (formerly known as Twitter) that residents of Kelawea Mauka, a neighbourhood on the edge of Lahaina, needed to leave.
Residents like Lynette “Pinky” Johnson loaded their cars with as many as could fit, before driving eastward along the Honoapiilani Highway - the only viable route to safety - as flames lapped at their wheels.
That’s terrifying. My family went to the Grand Canyon when I was a young teen and my brothers were even younger. They were romping around and I was sure one of them was going to die. That poor kid, and his poor family. I can’t imagine the absolute terror of watching your kid go over the edge.
It’s just insane. Where I live fire-fighters closely follow weather forecast, have deep understanding of wind patters in the area and if there’s any risk a forest fire will reach a village everyone is immediately evacuated. When volcano erupted in La Palma the mayor was personally knocking on doors to see if everyone left. Posting evacuation orders on X is a joke.
bbc.co.uk
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