Worst situation/scenario

hubbytuby

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Feb 1, 2008
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simi
I want you to tell use the worst situation you have ever been in and how your light saved or helped in any way. Tell what happened, who it involved, what light was used and how it help.
 

5kids

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Nov 6, 2007
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Mesa Arizona
One of my kids lost their shoe in the movie theater during WallE.:popcorn: We set out finding it, all I had was 3 lights. A Fenix LOD with a 10440, and the P2DQ5, and the Photo Mircolight really lit up that dark theater. BTW, movie theater floors are really gross if you look at them with a flashlight. We found the shoe a couple of rows up (don't ask).
We did wait until the end of the movie before using the flashlights.:sssh:

I did have close call nightmare situation last night. I was away from home playing Boy Scout Leader and needed a light, and realized I left my P2DQ5 at home, and my LOD was on my car keys at home and all I had was my wife's keycahin win a DX Photon Microlight clone. I adverted embarassment by finding something else to do that didn't need a flashlight. I violated the Boy Scout and CPF motto and was not prepared with adequate lighting.
 

LED-holic

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My car blew a tire when exiting the freeway. I pulled over to the shoulder on the access road, and used my flashlight to check the condition of the tire, and also to warn other drivers of my presence.

I used the flashlight to change the tire in the dim area, and it was of a great help.

Would have scraped knuckles and hurt myself possibly without a light.
 

gratewhitehuntr

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Aug 29, 2007
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Right behind you with a 6D Mag623 !!
was trying to detain two suspects in a shooting and they failed to comply with an order to remove their hands from their pockets

red 6D Mag with 4 x Emoli + Osram 64623 @ 10ft = burnt eyebrows + dented forehead

hit the switch and advanced/swung (man the lithium cells make it lite:twothumbs)

:duck::twak:

turned out that the one I :twak: had the weapon used in the shooting and was on parole
 

ozner1991

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Aug 7, 2008
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holland
finnaly someone with the guts to use an 6d mag as an baton :thumbsup:

oke when my light helped me out. it was an minimag with the 3 led niteize dropin and it helped me on an camping trip with school. aperently my tent wasnt waterproof for that kind of rain :thumbsdow:crackup:so my minimag helped me find the places where it leaked into the tent and i used tape to cover the places where it leaked

(cant wait for some of the other stories)
 

Illum

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Central Florida, USA
red 6D Mag with 4 x Emoli + Osram 64623 @ 10ft = burnt eyebrows + dented forehead

detaining suspects does not equal cooking the suspects :lolsign:

Camping out on a field beside a storm drain with a group:shrug:
Night comes with wind and rain. The field floods and the winds above snaps one of the tent rods. The ground gets saturated and the pegs pulled out. I had to mouth a surefire L4 to find the zipper and get myself out of the tent as it caught some lift and sailed its way into the flooded storm drain along with the air mattress, blankets, towels, and everything else that we had taken out from the car [nonessentials, just sleeping requirements]. If I was still in the tent I might have drowned. Someone else later reported he had a twister touchdown nearby, I believe him because the sound of the wind was almost deafening.
I caught a cold that night probably from being soaking wet, I packed plenty of spare cells so I thought what the heck, use the L4 as a handwarmer while providing light for the other tents around ours while they are "pumping" water out of their tents using towels. It took awhile to retrieve my tent:ohgeez:

The lights on me were all wet, but none of them stopped working.
L4, A2-WH, E01, L0D-CE Q4
the L4 just happened to be the one I was using to spread the air mattress when the gust blew in.
 
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Juggernaut

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A place in need of light.
My parents and I were about to give my cat fluid with an iv, the needle wasn't on right so my mother took it off and reattached it. This time she forgot to check to make sure there wasn't any air bulbs in the line. I was using my Task Force to give them extra light "it was night and their bedroom lights are dull." So any way she inserted the needle and about five seconds later I was moving my light back when I noticed a huge "at least 1.5 centimeter" gap in the line. We quickly disconnected the line. If I wasn't using my light I would never have seen that faint air gap and my cat probably would have died.
 

Sub_Umbra

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la bonne vie en Amérique
I'm a 'high mileage unit' which makes it hard to narrow it down to just one or two but:
Sub_Umbra said:
...In the early 70s I was on a small tug with a tow crossing the Gulf of Alaska when we lost our generator (lights, radio) and our main engines just as the barge we were towing began to sink into the 35F water. Amazingly, the only light that could be made to work that night was a dopey disposable incan, wrapped up in a baggie in my kit, that I had carried around for years. I gave it to the engineer and he used it to finally get a gas powered pump running and it saved the day....[/i]
Once again we see that even if you have to lug them around for years, when they are finally needed, spare lights are cool. On the other hand -- there are probably some who never carried spares but we never read their stories...because they didn't live to write them. Oh well...
 
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GPB

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I used to live about 30 miles from where Hurricanes Francis and Jeanne made landfall in the summer of 2004. With hurricane shutters on a house its dark even during the daytime, and the power was out for 7 days after the first storm. I had an Eveready flourescent latern, a 3D Mag and a few dive lights, that helped me get around inside and out during the storm and the power outages afterwards. I'm sure I would have survived without the lights, but there was something very comforting about them when I was hiding under my stairs watching a digital barometer waiting for an uptick in pressure and listening to the roof tiles crashing down outside.

I don't live in Florida anymore.
 

Hooked on Fenix

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Dec 13, 2007
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Too many situations to pick from.

On a 4 day church backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevadas, someone in our group wanted to get a picture of a bear. He mixed a concoction of oatmeal and fish guts around camp to attract the bears. That was a bad idea. At night, the first bear that came into camp stood outside the guy's only tent door as it stared me down from 20 feet away. I used a flashlight to see the bear and yelled for help. The bear left the area. That night, a group of bears ransacked our camp for food and trash. We temporary scared individual bears away with flashlights and camera flashes.

This June, my dad and I hiked up Mt. Whitney. We started at midnight and hiked throughout the night. Most of the trail was next to a cliff. Many parts of the trail were covered with snow. Some stream crossings were right above a waterfall. We wouldn't have survived without good flashlights and headlights.

I have been on many local night hikes where rattlesnakes, scorpians, and black widows are abundant. I have had to jump over a few rattlesnakes at night to get back (they lay across the trail). I wouldn't have seen them without a flashlight.

During the Witch fire, my family was evacuated from Ramona (birthplace of the two largest fires in California history-Cedar and Witch fires). We went 5 days without a real home. One day in a mall parking lot, 2 at a Motel 6, and 2 at a church in Lemon Grove. The smoke filled sky made it dark for most of the time. I took my supply of flashlights, but I left my Freeplay radio and Sherpa flashlight at home in the rush to get away. When we got home, we had no water. I hadn't done laundry in two weeks. One week was spent with with relatives as my mom died from cancer and we had her funeral the day before the fire. The other week was spent evacuated, then unpacking once we got home. We had another week at home before we could use the water. It was shut off to give firefighters enough water pressure to use their hoses. Apparently, the Ramona water district let their 50 or 60+ year old pump system blow a fuse that took them a long time to replace (they probably weren't made anymore). The backup system hadn't been functional for months. I'm sure you can understand why most of the town refused to pay their water bill when they got home. I had some friends who lost power and wouldn't get it back on for two weeks. I gave them all my loan out/ cheaper lights. They needed them more than I did. There were many people who were worse off.

When working for my dad wiring up a clean room at the University of Arizona in Tuzson, we worked all day in the dark. The worklights we did have were constantly being turned off as drywallers borrowed/stole our extension cords and safety inspectors cut the ends off our cords if they didn't have a ground. My Gerber LX 3.0 got a lot of use and was smacked hundreds of times on steel and concrete. It never stopped working. On my last day working there, I got trapped between floors in the freight elevator on a Saturday. My dad called 911 and in half an hour I was free to take the 10 hour drive home. We were the only ones working that day and the elevator wasn't lit well. My flashlight helped my sanity a little. It was the end of a 10 hour shift.

On a camping trip at Dos Picos park during an extreme fire ban (they wouldn't let me use a candle lantern in my tent and my Whisperlite stove had to be used in the firering with heat reflector and windscreen on with a gallon of water nearby to put it out in order for the ranger to let me use it) I saw a pair of eyes in the darkness near my camp. I put my Fenix P3D Q5 on turbo to see what it was. It was a mountain lion and the light blinded it and scared it away.
 
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gratewhitehuntr

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Right behind you with a 6D Mag623 !!
someone in our group wanted to get a picture of a bear. He mixed a concoction of oatmeal and fish guts around camp to attract the bears.

oh boy

I believe I might have killed that man.
Middle of the food chain sucks sweaty balls.


BTW, got a week suspension for clobbering that guy with the Mag.
I suspect it was because I caught him right over the eye (was aiming there) and opened a nasty cut.
Fact is that blood is even more blinding than 4200TL.

Official reason was "unauthorized weapon"

I tried telling them that flashlights are tools. :crackup: :crackup:

No go.

ok, on topic.........

shined a light in a boot the other day to look for anything the 3yo might have dropped in there (sticky stuff that doesn't shake out, learned the hard way :sick2:)

there was some kind of giant spider in there
think Wolf spider X 4

I'm not sure what they are called, but I know damn well that they make you sick if you are bitten
here is to still having all 10 toes :twothumbs
 

BBL

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eu/at
Had a 160km/h crash/spin/flip/rollover on the austrian autobahn some years ago... had a crappy but trusty lightwave-something on me, that i used to search for my stuff in the remains of the car. I think that might be the day, when this flashlight thing started :)
 

abarth_1200

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around this time last year i went down to my grans static caraven with my girlfriend on a short holiday, a few days in it started getting really cold so i plugged in all the electric fan heaters i could find, then sitting there watching the telly the power tripped, total darkness, can i just point out to you that at this pont in time i wasnt a flashaholic. I managed to find one of my grandpas torches, it was and 2AA energizer, really dull, anyway not knowing where the fuse box was i stumbled around opening cupboards eventuall found it and reset them but still no power so i went outside in look for the primary fuse box, hey presto opened it up flicked the switch and power was restored.

We went again this year and i felt like leaving a few of my torches around, if it had happend this year i probably woundnt have even bothered reseting the fuses lol
 

LED-holic

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Terminal 4
Had a 160km/h crash/spin/flip/rollover on the austrian autobahn some years ago... had a crappy but trusty lightwave-something on me, that i used to search for my stuff in the remains of the car. I think that might be the day, when this flashlight thing started :)
damn, you walked away? That's amazing. What the heck happened?
 

BBL

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eu/at
damn, you walked away? That's amazing. What the heck happened?
The driver (not me, i'm smarter) changed lane too appruptly. The rear end came loose and hit the guard rail. car spun around, drifting sideways with not much reduced velocity (it was not only dark but also raining). impacts guard rail again, spins, flips and rolls over the guard rail into the oncoming traffic on the other side. luckily there was no vehicle there in just that moment - there was heavy traffic on that lane. Was a close call, but only minor injuries.
 

Lightraven

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Sep 2, 2004
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My agency received information of a body in our area. My friend and coworker was known to have a Thor spotlight, so he was called to use his light to help search. They found the body. I'm glad this was before I got my Costco HID. Searching for a body is not something I need to do.
 

shomie911

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Jul 26, 2008
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Well there's a hurricane coming down here in South Florida.

I might get to try out my new flashlights. :twothumbs
 

frank777

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Oct 31, 2006
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I was hiking through a lava flow on Hawaii's Big Island southern tip. This particular lava flow had 6-foot crevices, and the lava was sharp like broken glass. Night-time came earlier than expected, and I happened to have my ARC-AAA with me. Without it, I would have ended up with quite a few nasty cuts. At the trail head, the ranger had pictures of people who had fallen and had to go to the hospital because their cuts were so bad.
 
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