Hello everyone and welcome to Scary Interesting.
Today's video covers three people who suffered some of the worst fates you can imagine.
The final story is a particularly tragic ordeal,
so viewer discretion is advised.
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Yellowstone National Park is a national park in the United States
that is famous for its wildlife and for its many geothermal features.
Beneath Yellowstone is something called the Yellowstone Caldera
which is actually the largest volcanic system in all of North America.
The magma chamber that is underneath Yellowstone is thought to be a single massive chamber
that is 37 miles (59.5 km) long, 18 miles (29 km) wide and 3 to 7 (4.8 to 11.3 km) miles deep.
At some point, this chamber is expected to erupt
like it has at least three times in history and decimate most of North America.
This caldera is responsible for much of the geothermal activity visible on the surface
and manifests as geysers and hot springs.
In fact, one of the most famous geysers in the entire world is located here known as Old Faithful
because it erupts a jet of water every 60 to 90 minutes.
The hot springs in the park are warmed by the geothermal activity
and can range from lukewarm pools to bubbling cauldrons of steam and boiling water.
Most of them are hotter than a very hot bath
and many of them are even hotter at just below boiling or literally boiling.
Since 1870, 22 people have died in the park in the hot springs from either accidentally falling in
or from carelessness — except for one.
On July 20th, 1981, 24-year-old David Allen Kirwan was driving through Yellowstone
in an area known as Fountain Paint Pot thermal area.
This is an area that has a bunch of brightly colored blue, green, and orange hot springs
that range from hot to boiling.
He was driving with his friend Ronald Ratliff and Ronald's dog, Moosie.
At around 1:00 PM, they parked in one of the visitor areas
so they could get out and check out the colorful hot springs.
As they were getting out, Moosie managed to jump out of the truck and took off towards the hot springs
and immediately jumped right into a pool known as the Celestine Pool.
Moosie immediately started yelping in pain from the water because the Celestine Pool he had jumped into
has been measured at just a few degrees below boiling.
David and Ronald sprinted over to the pool and got to the edge and called to Moosie
but in his panic, Moosie wasn't able to swim over to them.
So David decided that he couldn't just stand by and let Moosie die.
And so he got ready to jump in the water after him.
Some other visitors to the park noticed that he looked like he was going to jump in
and tried to warn him not to jump because of how hot the water was.
But David was determined to save Moosie and so he brushed them off,
took two steps back and then dove in head first into the boiling water.
He swam out to Moosie in the almost boiling water
and when he got him, he grabbed him and began swimming back to shore.
But before he made it back, he slipped under the water.
He ended up having to let go of Moosie and swim back to the edge all alone.
When he got to the edge, he was already so weak that he could barely make it out
and Ronald had to help him out.
In that brief second helping him out,
Ronald even suffered at second-degree burns pulling him out of the water.
Some other visitors helped David to the sidewalk and reality had begun to sink in
and David would even say, "That was stupid.
How bad am I? That was a stupid thing I did."
Exposure to the boiling water had left David blind and with third-degree burns on 100% of his entire body.
Some of the visitors then tried to help David get his shoes off and in doing so,
most of the skin peeled off of his foot.
In fact, skin was peeling off of most of his body.
He was eventually taken to Salt Lake City Hospital but died the following morning from his burns.
Unfortunately, Moosie wouldn't survive either.
Although David acted bravely to try to save Moosie, ultimately, it was a decision that cost him his life.
In the history of the park, many of the burns that visitors have gotten
have been from saving pets that have accidentally gone into the boiling pools
because as beautiful as they are to look at, these pools are just extremely dangerous.
Before dawn on October 11th, 2012, Jose Melena left to go work in Santa Fe Springs, California
where he worked as a maintenance worker for canned goods food company called Bumble Bee Foods.
That morning, Jose was going about his day, performing his normal tasks
which included maintenance on one of the large machines in the factory.
He walked into a large cylindrical opening of the machine and headed towards the back
where the maintenance needed to be done.
As he was working, all of a sudden, these giant pallets of tuna cans started rolling into the machine
and blocked him at the back of the machine where he was doing the repair.
Jose would've likely called out to the person who rolled the pallets in,
but because of how loud it was in the factory, they weren't able to hear him.
Then, Jose would've heard the horrifying sound of the door of the machine closing.
What had happened was that his coworkers thought that he had gone to the bathroom
and didn't realize he was inside the machine.
Not thinking that anyone was in there, they then loaded all of the tuna cans in order to sterilize them
because the machine that Jose was working on
and that his coworkers had just blocked him into was actually a giant pressure cooker.
Inside the machine with the door closed, Jose would've known that there was no way
for his coworkers to know that he was in there.
Then, even worse than the sound of the door closing
Jose probably would've heard the horrifying sound of the giant industrial oven turning on
to sterilize all of the cans blocking him in.
Over the next two hours, the temperature of the oven went up to 270 degrees and cooked Jose alive.
Later on, one of the managers of the factory started asking around about Jose's whereabouts
and even made an announcement over the loud speaker
but it wasn't until the oven was reopened and the tuna was pulled out
that they found Jose's body.
In the aftermath of the event, Bumble Bee Foods agreed to pay $6 million for violating a number of safety rules.
In addition to the fine paid by Bumble Bee Foods,
two managers at the facility were fined $30,000 each
for not following procedures that also contributed to Jose's death.
In Colombia, about 80 miles (128.7 km) west of the capital city of Bogota,
there is a mountain known as the Nevado del Ruiz that stands a staggering 17,500 feet (5,334 m).
Nevado del Ruiz is named the "Sleeping Lion" because it isn't an ordinary mountain.
It is actually a volcano that has been partially dormant since 1845.
In 1845 when the volcano last erupted, over a thousand people were killed in the valleys nearby.
Over the years since then, the volcano began to show signs that it might erupt once again.
These started off with just some small steam releases and then the occasional tremor,
but then in September of 1985, the tremors from the mountain became so powerful
that officials started to create evacuation plans for the nearby villages.
By October, they had created a hazard map to distribute to the residents
to show where debris might land or where lava flows might occur in the event of an eruption.
Unfortunately, the map was poorly distributed
and many of the residents in the nearby villages never received anything at all.
In particular, there were many high risk areas
that had been constructed in the direct path of potential lava flows
because the volcano had been dormant for so long.
In one of these nearby villages lived a 13-year-old girl named Omayra Sanchez.
Omayra was born on August 28th, 1972 in the village of Armero with a population of 31,000 people.
She lived with her father Alvaro who was a rice farmer, her mother Maria, a nurse, her brother and her aunt.
On November 13th, 1985, about midway through the day,
there were a series of long earthquakes that started off strong and then died off very slowly.
A volcanologist by the name of Bernard Chouet noticed these earthquakes
and tried to alarm his colleagues that these were signs of an eruption.
Then, at 9:08 PM, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, sending rocks and debris more than 30 kilometers (18.65 mi) into the atmosphere.
The eruption created a cloud of super heated gas that melted snow and ice at the summit of the mountain.
This then combined with rocks and mud into four thick mud flows known as lahars
that sped down the mountain into the nearby valleys at around 6 meters (19.7 ft) per second.
Along the way, as they picked up debris, they grew to be 50 meters (164 ft) wide and 2 meters (6.5 m) deep.
One of these lahars headed straight for Armero.
Just before 11:30 PM, the electoral grid was knocked out in the town
and the residents were incomplete darkness.
Then, at 11:30 PM, a lahar flooded into Armero and covered almost the entire town in a thick layer of mud.
Over the next several hours, two more waves would sweep into the town
killing over half of the population and destroying most of the buildings in their wake.
At some point during this destruction, the home of Omayra Sanchez was struck by a lahar,
destroying it instantly and crushing her father and aunt.
Omayra survived the initial impact, but the concrete foundation of the home had landed on her,
pinning her in place.
Even worse, the lahar was mixed with water that left a flood as it passed through
so Omayra was stuck almost neck-deep in water.
For a variety of reasons, the rescue operation didn't start until a few hours after the town had been struck.
This left many of the residents who were still alive stuck, trapped under debris and mud
in horrible conditions before rescuers started to arrive
including Omayra.
Omayra also had debris that had landed around her when her house had collapsed.
In the first hours of being stuck, she was able to move some of the debris off of her
in order for her to be seen by rescuers when they arrived on scene.
When rescuers did find her, it took almost the entire day after the eruption
to clear enough debris in order to actually reach her.
When they were finally able to reach her, they were able to assess the situation
and found that the debris that was pinning her in place was essentially a concrete wall.
This made it almost impossible for them to just pull her out of the water without breaking her legs.
The first journalist to arrive on the scene described Omayra as being in good spirits much of the time
despite the awful situation that she was in.
At times, she was scared and cried, but at other times, she was hopeful and prayed.
As she waited to be rescued, she ate sweet foods and drank soda
and would sing to the journalists on scene after agreeing to do some interviews.
Over the next day, rescuers tried a bunch of different things to get Omayra out from under the rubble.
When they tried just pulling on her, the water splashed around and made it difficult for her to breathe
and so they placed a tire around her to keep her afloat.
Divers then went into the water where she was pinned to assess the situation
and found that horrifically, before being crushed,
her aunt had wrapped her arms around Omayra's legs.
They also found that the debris that was pinning her in place would require heavy equipment to be lifted up.
On day three, the effects of gangrene and hypothermia had begun to set in
and Omayra began to hallucinate.
It was on this day that journalist Frank Fournier arrived in Armero
to conditions much worse than he could have ever imagined.
Many of the people who had been trapped on day one were still trapped two days later.
Instead of an organized and fluid rescue, he arrived to chaos and desperation.
There were just so many people trapped and so much debris
and so few resources that rescuers couldn't reach many of them.
On top of that, there just weren't enough rescuers.
Most of them were either civil defense workers or Red Cross volunteers.
The Colombian government was criticized in the aftermath of the event for its poor response to the disaster.
Some reports show that none of Colombia's 100,000-person army or 65,000-person police force were dispatched to join the rescue.
But the government claims that the conditions were simply too difficult to reach the town in time.
They lacked the resources and equipment to mobilize effectively across the vast swaths of mud
that stretched for miles across the flooded towns.
On the third day, as Frank walked through the chaos, he was greeted by a farmer who asked for his help
and led him to an unknown location.
When Frank arrived, he was met with the sight of 13-year-old Omayra Sanchez trapped in the rubble.
As her condition worsened, her face had swelled,
her hands had whitened and her eyes had turned a deep red.
It was on this day that doctors determined that in order to free her,
they would need to amputate her legs.
But because they lacked the necessary equipment for her to survive a double amputation,
It was ultimately decided that the most humane option was to let her die.
And so, at approximately 10:05 AM on November 16th, roughly 60 hours after being trapped,
Omar Sanchez passed away from either gangrene or hypothermia.
Shortly before her death that morning, Frank took this haunting picture
as a way of reporting her courage and her suffering in her horrible three-day ordeal.
Omayra's brother would survive the instant
and her mother who was away on business at the time of the disaster
tragically received the news of her daughter's death during a radio interview.
In total, over 23,000 people were killed, 13 villages were destroyed
and the Nevado Del Ruiz eruption remains the worst natural disaster in Colombia's history.
If you made it this far, I just wanted to thank you for watching and invite you to watch
some of the other videos on my channel that I think you'll enjoy If you enjoyed this one.
It's always cool to hear some of the stories of those of you who have personal connections to some of these events.
So if you do, let me know down the comments what they are.
I try to read almost all of them.
If you wanna support the channel, the best way to do that is to like the video and drop a comment down below.
And once again, thank you so much for watching and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.