There are many strange goodies for us in stores. Some are rather useless, others are
just bizarre, another ones are ridiculous and again some are dangerous. The story
today shows that even common goodies in the household can become a dangerous
item. In this case a 38-years-old british man with two children died of such one.

A clothes line similar to the model shown on the left became a deadly trap.

The man was probably doing some household stuff when he stumbled over a nearby chair. Then he fell with his head so unluckily into the clotheshorse (namely between the first and second crossing bar section) and caused it to collapse. The shear power of the bars then must have developed some more power when the man tried to get himself out again of the miserable situation. Finally he suffocated as the two bars developed too much pressure on his neck.

I still wonder about the rather odd construction design of this clotheshorse anyway.

Sure, it brings more clothes onto one rather small spot, yet I wonder why the bolts that keep the bars together did not bend or break as usually. Okay, most of the cheaper producted items don’t have a predetermined breaking point at all. So they can be considered dangerous. Yet the design of this clotheshorse must be considered a fatal design error as a man finally got harmed by it.

The other question is, how high is the chance to being suffocated by a clotheshorse? Probably less than being hit by a meteor…

By the way: in 2007 two indian people were hit by a meteor, just in case you’d say that being hit by a meteor is almost impossible…