When we look at the ladder related news from across the world many of the stories we see are tragedies, where someone has been killed as the result of a fall from a ladder, electrocution or other misadventures involving heights.  We see a lot of incidents of people being struck by ladders or other items which have not been secured to a vehicle, which have then come loose on the road. It's rare to find a lucky escape from these events, especially as most of them involve motorcyclists, who don't have the protection of a car to shield them from items that might fly off a truck.

Travis Irwin, 24, from the Gold Coast, had a lucky escape when a ladder rack came loose from a vehicle and flew down the road, catching his bike and sending him spinning across the road straight into the path of a car, and then into the side of another one.  He is lucky to have escaped with only minor injuries, and miraculously no broken bones.  He had a few bandages, and definitely needed a new helmet after the bashing he took on the road, but he realises just how lucky he was to be able to walk away from that accident.  Only the month before a motorcyclist was killed in the same area, after being struck by a loose ladder on the road.

In another tale of antipodean luck, an electrician in New Zealand nearly got stranded on the roof of a building he was working on in Whangarei.  He had been called out to fix a chiller unit located on the roof of a pizza restaurant.  He was very sensible and opted to access the roof at the lowest point, which happened to be by the liquor store, a separate unit in the same building.  He was therefore out of sight of the ladder while he was working and didn't notice when it went missing. 

After finishing the job, electrician Tom Clancey returned to his ladder to descend, only to find it had disappeared.  Thinking it may have been moved by a member of staff at the restaurant where he'd been working, he called the premises and asked if anyone had moved his ladder.  None of the staff had, however a member of staff rushed home to fetch a spare ladder, so Clancey could get back down.  The story of the missing ladder then picked up momentum in the press, as there had been a spate of thefts from tradespeople and building sites, with this latest ladder loss assumed to be linked to that.

It wasn't until five days later, when Sandeep Singh, the owner of the liquor shop, was shown an article about this missing ladder, that the mystery was solved.  It turned out that he had seen the ladder against his premises and, unable to see anyone on the roof that may have been using the ladder, moved it to a safe, out of sight location at the back of his shop, in order to stop it being stolen.  He had then asked at various businesses within the arcade whether the ladder belonged to them and it was only later on,when somebody connected the dots, he realised that the stolen ladder from the pizza restaurant was, in fact, the lost ladder he had been keeping safe.  Just under a week after losing his ladder, Clancey was reunited with it and now has a great anecdote to tell at parties, and pizza restaurants, for the rest of his life.