Mayhem & Mishaps: Britain Caught on Camera

Everyday life can be surprisingly perilous.

Slips and trips...

..bangs and crashes...

splashes and sparks.

But what are the most dangerous things we do,

and why are our lives so prone to catastrophe?

To find out, we've enlisted experts and scientists

who dedicate their lives to protecting us from daily disaster.

This sort of thing is potentially very, very dangerous.

We'll see what, if anything, we can do to protect ourselves.

This would be good for a relatively soft surface,

where you actually sink into it, something like mud.

And the full range of our daily mishaps...

..has never been more visible.

Thanks to the UK's 31 million smartphones

and almost 2 million CCTV cameras,

the nation's catastrophic blunders and epic fails

are being recorded like never before.

From the unpredictable...

What are you doing?

..to the avoidable...

and the downright daft.

We're going to reveal the mayhem and mishaps of everyday life.

Since time began, humans have gasped and giggled

at other people's minor misfortunes, but a more modern phenomenon

is videoing it...

..and then instantly sharing it with the world.

But to navigate the vast amount of online mishaps

would take for ever, so we've done it for you.

We've trawled the stats and grilled experts

to identify the most dangerous, destructive

and disaster-prone areas of our lives.

For each category of chaos,

we've unearthed a wealth of dramatic and surprising video clips.

We'll discover which are our most damaging domestic activities...

Breakfast is now on...

..and probe one of our costliest pitfalls away from home.

-Whoa!

-Engine dead.

Argh! THEY LAUGH

We'll investigate the tricks and techniques

that keep disaster at bay...

..and reveal which everyday accident causes more hospital admissions

than any other.

Gah!

But first, the epitome of personal disaster -

humiliating and possibly painful... it's walking into things.

We've all done it, banged into an item of street furniture...

or even walked into a wall.

But there were over 20,000 hospital admissions last year

after people walked into or somehow collided with other objects.

Often, it's when we're distracted.

Cross the road while texting

and it's been found you're four times more likely

to ignore the traffic or lights.

This woman coming down the steps of a Birmingham shopping centre

on her phone is heading for an unplanned bath.

But get distracted, and you can walk into far worse.

This is Eoin Clarke. Ironically, he runs a CCTV company,

and he was caught in an alarming incident on his own cameras.

I help out in this pub doing music at the weekends.

Somebody asked me to change the channel on the TV.

I went behind the bar, got the remote, walked towards the TV

and the ground just swallowed me up.

It was about 10, 12 feet, that's quite a drop.

The boss quickly closes the trapdoor,

rushing down the stairs to help.

The shocked staff had known it was open,

but didn't expect Eoin to join them.

I should have been seriously injured, you know,

so I'm very, very, very lucky.

You are supposed to have a barrier or someone on the lookout

around an open trap door, but these accidents happen again and again.

Now, of course, looking where you're going isn't a bad idea.

But sometimes what we walk into is designed not to be seen.

Full-height glazing - around the world, it's all the rage.

Shops...

offices...

even in our homes, bringing that wonderful sense of openness.

BLEEP

Across Europe, we're using around 50% more glass

than we did two decades ago,

so the safety of this famously fragile material

has become extra important.

At least for most of us.

A classic example that we did have was a burglar

who inadvertently got... Well, he got caught

because he had ripped his hand open

trying to open a window which was locked.

And the police just followed the trail of blood

around the corner, where he was still trying to stop the bleeding.

This criminal in Australia came a cropper

when he confused a full-height window for an open door.

This actually happened to me.

I was on holiday and it was getting dark, and I wasn't looking

and I walked straight through a 10-foot plate glass window.

I could have quite easily been killed,

because the glass, when it falls...

As I went through, it just fell behind me like a guillotine

and then just shattered all over the floor.

The problem with glass is that it's just too see-through.

If you're not looking where you're going,

it is likely that you won't see it coming -

which is why it's extremely important that it doesn't hurt you.

Well, not as badly as it might.

To make things safer, architects use toughened glass

that can withstand severe punishment

and leaves us with nothing worse than a bump on the head.

So, what's the difference between glass you can do this to...

and glass you can't?

So, this is just a standard piece of glass

that you might find from a glazier.

We're going to heat it up and then cool it down very rapidly

and at the end of that process, we will have a piece of toughened glass.

Paul Warren from Pilkington Glass has a very noisy machine

that'll make ordinary glass five times tougher before our very eyes.

Surprisingly simply, all you do is heat it up and cool it down,

very quickly under jets of cold air.

-There's no gas or chemicals...

-No.

-..it is just common or garden air.

Just common or garden air.

Apparently the top and bottom surfaces harden straight away,

but the inner core of the glass takes longer to set

and tries to shrink a bit, pulling the outer surfaces inwards,

making them tighter and tougher.

OK, so here we have a piece of toughened glass.

-It looks...It looks no different...

-No different...

-..to the glass that we put in.

-Exactly.

So, simply, you've heated it up,

you've cooled it down within five minutes

and now that's five times tougher coming out as it was going in?

-That's it?

-More or less, yes.

Well, Paul says it's tougher, but I want proof.

So they've arranged a demonstration that's more in my area of expertise.

And that's generations of back garden footballers.

BLEEP

Oh, my God!

I'm going to kick a ball through this window...

on purpose.

First in the firing line, it's ordinary un-toughened glass.

So all I've got to do is recreate what I did

-to my teacher Mrs Mallinson's window back in the 1980s?

-Exactly.

-And put a ball through it.

-Yep.

-No pressure then, here.

-No.

-OK?

-No.

Right.

Is that safe to go near?

If you walked into this, those shards could be deadly,

which is why fitting ordinary glass in and around doors

was banned in the early '90s.

Next, a pane of glass that's been through the toughening process

of heating and rapid cooling.

-Let's give this a go, then.

-OK.

Well, my incredibly powerful right foot

proves that this is indeed far stronger.

Agh!

But in a floor-to-ceiling situation,

glass has to withstand more than a football.

That might not be the most scientific way of doing it.

You do have more scientific ways here, using the pendulum.

We do, we have a pendulum which is a 50kg steel weight

with a couple of tyres wrapped around it just to soften the blow a bit,

and that's supposed to simulate a person running into the glass.

Right, so now we're going to simulate a person

running into the toughened glass because that, quite frankly,

didn't work.

These days, glass in door areas and any window within 80cm of the floor

must be safe even under a massive impact.

Whoa! Whoa!

Now I know what you're thinking - "That's broken."

But there's breaking, and there's breaking.

That has gone everywhere, but when you look at it,

look at the minute pieces compared to the jagged shards

that came out of the last one.

Exactly, that's what toughening is designed to do -

it's designed first of all to make the glass stronger

so it doesn't break, but if it does break,

it breaks in a manner that is classed as safety glass.

So, why does toughened glass break like this?

The reason goes back to those cooling nozzles

in the toughening process.

Under polarised light, you can see where the air jets have

created stresses in the glass, right across the pane.

If it does break...

the stresses inside the glass transmit the cracks

across the entire surface, so large shards don't form.

That kind of pattern that also happens sometimes

when you're driving and you've got your sunglasses on,

-is that a similar...?

-It's exactly the same thing,

the rear windows of a car have been subjected to exactly the same process

and if you are wearing sunglasses,

they effectively polarise the light

and so you can see exactly the same pattern.

Luckily for this waitress, toughened glass breaks

so completely that the pieces are too small to hurt.

And when this American decides to walk through the office window,

he can walk away from it too, with only a headache.

So, a simple process of heating and cooling glass...

Ow.

..can save you from serious damage.

Although it won't, of course, save your blushes.

All manner of mishaps get caught on camera.

From the spectacular things that happen to us at work...

..to the more familiar domain of our homes.

Sometimes the devastation is out of our control...

BLEEP

..but other times it's of our own making.

Take badly-installed washing machines.

Alarming spin cycles can occur

when someone's left in the temporary fixing bolts

that stop the drum wobbling in transit.

Overloaded machines account for many other damaged washers...

..although chucking a breeze block in may be asking for it.

But there's something we do at home

that can cause much more widespread devastation.

Do-it-yourself, an activity so hazardous,

it causes an estimated 220,000 hospital trips per year.

People do DIY that they are not qualified to do.

A classic example is a dad up a ladder trying to drill something,

nobody at the bottom of the ladder,

ladder wobbles, drill misses, drill goes into hand.

We do get some people coming in

having put their finger in a light socket, trying to fix it.

This is an injury sustained by a gentleman who was using a nail gun.

This gentleman has pressed the button, the gun has jumped

and as he's jumped, his finger has hit the button again

and unfortunately, the nail has gone straight through his hand.

And even if no bodily harm is caused...

What are you doin'?!

..over 60% of DIY-ers say they have caused damage to their homes.

Yeah... Oh...!

One insurance company estimated the annual cost of putting right

Britain's bodged handiwork is a staggering...

And there's a time of year insurance companies can see a spike in claims,

around the spring bank holidays.

BLEEP

One insurance company found out

that one particular year

in the month of May, when there were two banks holidays, of course,

there was a 20% increase in claims.

Claims go up to £10,000,

so people are doing some pretty brutal things out there.

So, what are our most frequent DIY blunders?

According to one insurer, at number three, it's breaking a window...

..at two, it's damaging a wall...

..and our commonest cockup is spilling paint.

But an ambitious few will take on a plumbing project.

Gary Ellis from Luton got out of his depth

with a job he thought would be simple.

The idea was that we were changing the downstairs toilet suite over,

which involved doing some plumbing, and that's when disaster struck.

It's supposed to be the main stopcock...

'I was working down in the corner, trying to actually

'take the pipe out and then redo the pipe work.

'Unfortunately, the stopcock didn't work at all.'

Stepson James was on the scene in seconds...

..but not to offer help.

I was just upstairs watching TV

and I just heard water just spraying everywhere.

I knew that Gary was working on the bathroom downstairs

so I grabbed my camcorder and ran down the stairs.

What can I do? Can I turn off anything?

'I was just worried about Gary turning around

'and seeing the camera, cos I knew he'd go mad,

'so I was holding the camera to the side...'

and I was saying, "Oh, what do you want me to help you with,

"do you want me to get you any towels or...?"

JAMES LAUGHS

But I knew he was recording, I didn't need to see.

You don't do anything without recording it.

Home improvement enthusiasts, take note.

Today's DIY disaster could well become tomorrow's viral video.

Not a good time to be videoing, James.

So, expect the unexpected - and if it's plumbing you're doing,

consider wearing wellies, not slippers.

If it's not DIY that's at the root of our bank holiday calamities,

then we're often cooking up trouble for ourselves in another way.

Barbecues.

Britain has about 120 million of them a year -

over three times more than a decade ago,

and of course, not all of us have mastered the technique,

with blackened food that's raw inside

contributing to a swell in food poisoning every summer.

And that's not our only incompetence.

Hilarious as these lot may think it is...

..pouring petrol on hot coals is downright dangerous.

Water, water!

Argh!

One insurance company calculated barbecue misuse

caused over £600 million of fire damage in a two-year period.

LAUGHTER

Here in St Helen's, it was the garden furniture

that ended up chargrilled.

The barbecue's done, because the table's on fire.

LAUGHTER

Classic.

The one consolation with an out-of-control barbecue

is the fact that it's outdoors and can't easily spread.

But indoors, it can be a different story.

REVERSE ALARM BEEPS

Cooking fires can get out of hand incredibly quickly,

and in the worst-case scenarios take hold before we even know it.

Come here. Come into the kitchen.

These housemates seem oblivious to the danger of a small cooking fire.

BLEEP

Most of us would turn off the heat and maybe cover the pan

with a wrung-out tea towel...

not dump its contents in the bin.

Oh, my... Oh, my God!

Chuck the whole bin out.

These three were lucky, but our casual approach to cooking

can have the most horrendous consequences.

Over 60% of fires in houses start in the kitchen,

and the majority of those fires which start in the kitchen

centre around the cooker.

It's significantly worse if you're using oil.

But Lee Shears from Cheshire Fire Service tells me

it's not just the old burning chip pan that catches us out.

As healthier cooking has caught on, grilling fatty foods

is now a regular cause of fire, especially if we're distracted.

When you're using grill pans and frying pans

-and oil, you know - it's very easy to say, isn't it? But, yes...

-Yeah.

..you've got to look after your children,

you go and answer the telephone, and then you're not paying attention.

If it gets too hot, you can't turn the heat down,

you can't remove it from the cooker,

and it can quite easily catch fire and then spread

to the rest of your kitchen very quickly.

So, basically, when I'm cooking bacon,

I shouldn't then go and take my wife a cup of tea in bed,

she should come down and get her own cup of tea

so that I'm still looking at the grill pan?(!)

I think I'm going to have to pass on that question, I think!

I don't want to upset your wife.

To prove grills want watching, Lee's going to put on some breakfast.

But I'm taking precautions,

as I've heard he likes his bacon very well done.

We've got a real kitchen in a real block of flats due for demolition.

Breakfast is now on.

How's it looking on the thermal imaging at the moment?

If you look on the image, you've got quite a lot of heat

above the cooker itself, but that's all we'd expect at this time

and most other things around it are fairly cool.

For the first ten minutes our grill just heats up

and the food cooks away.

But that's about to change.

What I'd expect is that we start to get some flaming

on top of the grill pan.

-So there we go...

-There you go.

-Right on cue, Mark.

Bacon fat catches fire at about 350 degrees centigrade,

but a build-up of old fat

and food remnants in our grill pan brings that temperature down.

If you keep a nice, clean grill pan,

you know, there's much less chance of it happening.

Now, if you'd just popped out of the room at this point

things would be turning nasty without you knowing.

That'll start to spread a little over the sides of the cooker.

And you can see, as well, the first signs of smoke.

If you breathe in smoke, sometimes it can be 1,000 degrees.

The effect of that is a burn on the inside of the lungs.

If you look up to your left here, you can see clearly on the wall...

-Yeah.

-..that layer of smoke as it starts to make its way down

and you can feel yourself starting to get quite warm now.

Yes, a lot warmer.

You only need a very small fire, and it creates a lot of smoke.

If that smoke is inhaled, you're inhaling a cocktail

of airborne chemicals, carbon monoxide, cyanide.

When you breathe in carbon monoxide, it binds to the haemoglobin,

which transports oxygen around your body.

That means that you have less oxygen travelling around your body,

and that can have serious consequences.

About 15 minutes since the grill went on,

we'd be choking without the breathing gear,

and yet the fire is only just starting to spread

to the next cupboard.

Can you imagine trying to find your way out of this?

I can just about make out an outline of one of the chairs

and I can make out where the flames are,

-but there's not a great deal else that now I can see.

-No.

And you would become massively disorientated.

With the kitchen starting to collapse in front of us,

it's time to get out and let the fire crew in.

I am dripping, absolutely dripping.

The heat is unbelievable, but not as unbelievable as the smoke.

And if you get home from the pub

and put on some bacon for a bacon sandwich

and fall asleep, even in your own house, as soon as the smoke comes,

crikey, you're going to be in trouble.

Emergency crews attend around 20,000 cooking fires a year.

Over 4,000 people are injured...

and, sadly, around 30 die.

So, clean your grill pan, check your smoke alarm

and if there is a fire, get out and call 999.

Out and about, transport is another area of life

where drama and danger gets caught on camera.

On the rail network, tens of thousands of security cameras

bring to light some shockingly reckless incidents...

..and some terrifying near misses.

HORN BLARES

Thankfully, incidents like this are few and far between,

but should be a warning to take care.

CAR ENGINE APPROACHES

Our transport troubles are much more diverse

when we do the driving ourselves.

ONLOOKERS LAUGH

Britain's cars bear the brunt

of a staggering £19 million worth of damage every day.

And it's icy roads that can cause a real spike in insurance claims,

sometimes over 30%.

Oddly, that's despite the fact that we appear to be taking more care.

What's really interesting about snowy weather

is that, actually, the number of people suffering injury

goes down by up to half,

but, actually, damage to cars goes up.

So people are driving more carefully,

so they're not suffering those big whiplash claims,

but they're making small crashes and prangs in the snowy weather.

You could be the best driver in the whole world

and still suffer quite a lot of damage to your car,

and that's because the top type of claims that happen in snowy weather

are to cars that are parked.

HORN HONKS

Of course, just parking your car in the first place

can be sometimes nigh-on impossible.

In the end, this driver in Leeds

decides that halfway up the neighbour's step

is about as good as it's going to get.

Agh!

Are you all right?

And, talking of parking, you might want to wait

till you've actually done it before getting out.

BLEEP

They've just left the car.

But, in other extreme weather, our behaviour is very different.

Getting behind the wheel after heavy rain,

many drivers think they're invincible -

perhaps at the helm of some sort of river craft -

and they end up trashing the engine...

..or even in danger.

Driving through flowing water is never a good idea.

Just one foot of it can move a family car.

Six inches can sweep a person off their feet.

These Kilmarnock motorists were very lucky indeed,

and the only thing swept away was their no-claims discount.

You'd imagine that we'd be used to rain in this country

and take it all in our stride,

but maybe complacency is part of our problem

because, when it comes to downpours, we think we've seen it all,

but in fact, our country has been getting a lot wetter of late.

Four out of five of the wettest years on record

have occurred since the year 2000.

2007, which was known as the year of the great floods for insurers,

one insurer reported there were 11,000 calls for claims

in a single month.

Normally for that month,

they'd have expected just 350 general flood claims.

SCREAMING

Oh, my God!

In 2012, an estimated 16,000 cars were involved

in flood insurance claims.

It's a serious issue for insurers.

There have been many cases of people being pretty daft in flood water.

So, if the rain's getting worse,

what's the secret of staying out of trouble?

I've come to this test track to meet ex-army commando Steve Trulia...

..and we're going to take a couple of scrapyard specials for a dip.

The most important thing

is not to drive into anything that you can't see the bottom of.

A lot of people, especially if they're driving a 4x4,

the old Chelsea tractor, think they're driving a tank -

not necessarily the case.

It won't go through everything, so you need to be careful.

And, so, we've got our two cars over there,

we've got a little car and we've got our 4x4,

your "Chelsea tractor," as you like to call it.

-Will they both survive in here?

-Yeah, they ought to,

-there's no reason they shouldn't...

-Both of them?

-Yeah, they should,

there's no reason they shouldn't get through OK.

Well, the only reason may be if I'm behind the wheel.

We'll have to do a couple of things technically while we're driving.

-If we get those things right, we'll get through it no problem at all.

-OK.

It sounds obvious, doesn't it?

Don't drive through anything too deep.

Yet many of us do.

I think I'd sit and wait

for somebody else to make it through first...

..but that's no guarantee,

because even if your car is higher than the one in front,

like this one, there's a couple of other things

that'll determine whether or not you get your feet wet.

There we go.

I'm rubbish when it comes to looking under a car bonnet.

I know where my windscreen washer is and sometimes my oil,

but that's about it.

So what are we looking for in relation to this?

This is all about a thing called the air intake,

and that's this thing here,

this little tube that supplies air to the engine.

The engine needs fuel and it needs air as well.

The height of this is what's critical to us,

and on this car, it's about 60cm up,

so that gives us some idea, as long as we don't get water in there,

so as long as that water level's below 60 cm, we should be safe.

So this plastic tube sucks air in, takes it through into the engine...

Through into the engine, yeah. Air, not water.

-Right, if it sucks in water...

-Very expensive, engine broken.

'But how water resistant are the engines of 4x4s?'

Obviously, it feels like it should be higher

-because the car is higher...

-Yeah.

..but I don't get it, cos my engine expertise...

-It isn't necessarily the case...

-I can't see it.

OK, it's here and actually, it's a little incomplete.

It's sometimes got a little piece on it that raises it up higher,

but that seems to be missing.

All right, well, we got the car from a scrapyard, so...

-But, anyhow...

-And it could fall off.

Of course, some 4x4s have a snorkel up on the roof,

cos they're designed for driving in muddy and wet terrain.

Oh, right, OK. So when you see the...

So that is an actual snorkel?

Snorkel, that's exactly what it's called, a snorkel.

-So we don't have that on this, though.

-We don't, so this one...

-where it is now, we're probably at about 80cm...

-OK.

So, a little bit more than the other one...

It's not a lot, though, is it?

I mean, when you look at the two vehicles,

this looks considerably higher, but that's not a lot

in the grand scheme of things.

It's not, and I think a lot of 4x4s now aren't necessarily designed

to be full-on off-road vehicles without modification.

No, but that - you can understand why you get the impression,

then, if you drive a 4x4, that you're indestructible,

but actually, you know, when you go beneath the bonnet,

-everything's quite similar.

-Yeah, absolutely.

Surprisingly, despite wetter weather of late,

air intakes on some newer cars have been getting lower,

where it's cooler and better for engine efficiency.

So it's more important than ever to know the next bit -

how to drive in water,

something even the professionals get wrong from time to time.

Oh, well done(!)

ONLOOKERS CHEER SARCASTICALLY

LAUGHTER

I love it when a plan comes together!

When you're in a hurry,

the temptation can be to drive a little too quickly...

Need a push?!

..As these officers undoubtedly now know,

that can create a giant bow wave

that splashes water right into your air intake.

And that is us, bang, engine gone... did you hear it go pop?

-Yeah, yeah. Oh, my word.

-What a mess.

Oh, that's disgusting.

Augh...

-So, if you look at where our air intake pipe is...

-Yeah.

..to highlight it on the outside,

it'd probably be about there, wouldn't it?

And that's a big difference between where it is

and where the water level is.

Yeah, exactly. You'd think that that was safe, wouldn't you?

Well, it would be, perhaps, if you went cautiously,

if you didn't go gung-ho and go and create a big bow wave

and damage your engine.

Yeah, so the only reason the water reached the air intake pipe

-was because of the speed we entered the water.

-Absolutely.

Take it really slowly, and you should make it.

There's just one other trick,

which this driver near Bath clearly knows.

The exhaust pipe is going to be submerged in water at that depth,

so we need to keep the revs high so that there's exhaust fumes

coming out to stop the water going in and blocking the exhaust.

So, high revs, constant speed, not too fast.

-Don't go too fast, so you're in first gear...

-Yeah.

-..if you feel you're going too fast, just slip the clutch a bit...

-OK.

..and keep it smooth and keep it up.

No... That's it, not much faster.

That's good speed, good speed, higher revs, higher revs,

higher revs, higher revs, high revs, high revs, keep going, keep going,

keep going, keep going, nice and smooth, that's it,

keep going, keep the revs up, keep going, keep going...

good, excellent.

Out the other side, clear it first...and...stop.

-Well done.

-Whoa.

-Whoa!

-I got a bit worried, then.

-I did too!

I got a bit worried, then. That felt very weird,

at one point I thought that was going to go horribly wrong.

It really... I thought we'd lost it in the middle.

-Obviously...

-Back off.

-..the natural instinct is to back off...

That's why I was saying, "Keep your revs up."

-Keep your revs up...

-..cos that's what will keep us safe.

-Constant.

When your engine sucks in water,

you'll be lucky if your car isn't a write-off.

-Ah...

-Oh!

THEY LAUGH

Oh, we've got drinks bottles, there's a CD on the back seat

that's floating, it came through the sun roof, as well.

Then, there's only one way you're going to get your motor out...

..which, for some people, is clearly an adventure...

Look, Megan! We're getting rescued by a police car.

..but for others is only the start of the grief.

MAN SHOUTS

The irony is, this man's misfortune could have been caused

by just an egg cup-full of water.

We're looking into the most mishap-prone areas of our lives...

Ooh!

..as caught on camera by millions of mobile phones and CCTV.

Take the 13,500 hospital admissions last year

after people fell off their chairs...

-CRASH

-Ow.

Don't jump. You'll hurt yourself.

..and the 10,000 others

that followed falls from playground equipment.

Whoa!

We can use this catalogue of calamity

to try and avoid it happening to us.

So far, all our mishaps could have been prevented

by the poor victim...

or somebody close by.

But our next category of accidentally filmed incidents

strikes anybody passing without warning...

and can be so unexpected, it's only the prevalence of cameraphones

and CCTV that's brought them into the public eye.

When the floor beneath our feet erupts...

it can be spectacular.

Oh, God, it's getting higher! It's like a tree!

LAUGHTER

Oh, no!

Burst water mains can also be dangerous.

It's throwing stones in the air.

And smashing all the cars.

However, occasionally,

there's a much more dramatic type of pavement eruption.

Oh, my God!

It's not really what you'd expect, is it?

You're walking down the street and the suddenly - bang!

There go the flagstones from beneath your feet.

But it's a phenomenon that's being captured more and more,

thanks to CCTV and mobiles.

The man walking towards the camera in this London street

is about to have a lucky escape.

I saw a...broken pavement, and then a puddle as well,

and I decided to get off the pavement onto the main street,

and then about a good two seconds later

I heard a large rumbling sound.

I turned around and I saw fire gushing up

from the bottom, with smoke.

You could even smell burnt rubber.

It happened in exactly the position where those men are actually working.

Completely caught me off guard - I mean, why would this be happening,

you know, on a friendly street in London?

I consider myself to be really lucky

to have actually got off the pavement at the right moment

before that explosion took place.

Someone was watching over me on that day.

The electricity in the area went off...

so I would assume it could have been related to a power cable, perhaps.

There have been about 50 pavement blasts in London

in the last three years.

But they occur all over Britain...

..this one, in Peterborough...

and many of these incidents are indeed related to buried cables.

Dr Iliana Portugues, an expert in power distribution,

knows all about them.

Yes, under here there's probably...

probably several cables supplying all of this street.

What, and they carry different amounts of power?

You would probably be looking at three different sizes in general.

11,000 volts, 400 volts and perhaps a couple of 240 volt cables.

So what can make an electrical cable explode seemingly at random?

When something does occur, it has to be produced by an external factor.

Sometimes these electricity cables get tampered with by people

or through roadworks, or suffer some damage

through movement of the soil and these, if extreme,

can cause a short-circuit.

There's all manner of cables running beneath our feet,

installed over the century or so we've had mains power.

When they explode, it's usually one of the higher voltage ones

that turns out to be the culprit.

So we've got a variety of cables here, haven't we,

that look different,

but I'm assuming they're essentially the same.

Yes, they're essentially the cables one would find

distributing electricity from outside the city,

throughout the city, to your house.

This is the core conductor carrying the electricity.

This is the insulation that safeguards the conductor.

Here we've got a lead shielding surrounding and supporting the cable,

and here we've got further insulation

to support and insulate the conductor.

And when a cable is damaged, then, what happens then,

what is the science behind the explosions that we then see?

In cases of digging, when you dig a cable and you damage the cable,

if something exposes the cable to the elements

and things like rain, which in this country happens often, for...

and water is a problem, because water carries electricity.

It accumulates through the crack that you've created

and it touches the main conductor, which is the centre bit,

and the outside strands which are earth,

and that short circuit, it creates the spark.

Famously, electricity and water don't get on very well.

Stand by, we're going to charge the unit. Power on.

We've asked special effects wizard Mark Turner to prove it.

Three...two...one...

That's what nearly 10,000 volts meeting a tank full of water looks like.

Do not copy this in any way.

Now, of course, that was a big effect that we set up.

But what it does demonstrate is the power of electricity

and the fact that even though it can create a lot of good things,

one really needs to be very respectful of it.

Next, we're going to try

and recreate the sort of explosion you might get

when a tiny bit of water

seeps through the insulation of a damaged cable.

So what we've done here is, we've first prepared the cable.

We've done this by cutting the insulation and letting seep

the inside current-carrying core and the outside, which is the ground.

So that cable is now damaged

in the same way that a cable would be damaged

if a digger had gone through it or if the ground had shifted?

Exactly.

The core and the earthing mesh aren't touching, but add water,

which in reality could take time to penetrate, and there's a connection.

Standing by to fire. Three...two...one...

Wow. That was, er... that was quite big, wasn't it?

-I think so, let's go and see what it will look like.

-OK.

What are you expecting to see here?

I expect to see some blacked cable, ideally.

And look, you can see here, some of it's blackened out.

The current passes from the inner core, through the water,

to the outer earthing wires, causing a spark and a burst of flame

and this is the story behind most pavement explosions.

Of course, if the cable would have caught fire,

anything surrounding it would have caught fire.

Then we're no longer talking about the electric spark,

we are now talking about a standard fire.

By this point, circuit breakers would cut the supply.

What's left to fizzle and burn is the insulation.

And sometimes in manholes, flammable gases build up which,

when ignited, can really go bang.

Oh, my God!

As dramatic as these incidents are, they're also relatively rare,

especially when you consider the hundreds of thousands of miles

of electric cable that are underneath our towns and cities

just sitting there, doing their jobs without us noticing them.

But if the pavement was to explode in front of you,

this might explain what happened.

There's one final everyday mishap that occurs more often

than anything else...

falling over.

The all-time comedy standby.

Yet slips, trips and falls are THE most common way we injure ourselves.

Over 40% of our emergency injuries involve some sort of fall.

Simply walking along is the most disastrous thing we do.

And never is this more apparent than in winter.

This video, filmed in Norwich, became an internet hit

when Paul Carver

noticed how almost every passer-by was slipping on the same icy spot.

The reason it was bad, I think it was due to this pipe here,

where a lot of the water had come down and frozen overnight

and we just filmed it for two or three hours in my sister's flat,

so I had a perfect line of sight of the chaos.

A lot of people didn't see how bad that black ice was.

Nine out of ten people who walked across it fell.

It was that bad, it was like a sheet of glass.

There was a young girl who came out, she even made a little sign to put

on the cones, "Don't walk here", and people still didn't pay attention

and in the end I see her do this with her hands, and she walked off.

You know, if people aren't going to listen to me, what's the point?

Once the video went on air, the council had come down

and cleared the paths, gritted this area of the path quite quick.

Luckily, no-one got injured. Most of the people were young students.

There was no-one who was in trouble,

otherwise we would have been the first people who would have been down there.

It's a wonder nobody was hurt.

Every year, icy pavements cause a huge surge in hospital visits...

..and there's one particular injury that occurs more than most.

People slipping on ice will

put their hands out to protect themselves

and in the more elderly population,

the shock of hitting the ground

usually hits the weaker parts of their bones, which is here,

and younger people, it's usually higher up.

This is a classic slip injury,

sometimes known as the dinner-fork deformity.

What's happened is, somebody has slipped,

they have put their wrist out to break their fall,

and as they have broken their fall,

all that impact has gone straight into the wrist

and almost sheared the wrist completely off.

See, the hand almost looks like it's been moved completely sideways.

We see more of these during the winter months

than we do at any other time of the year.

When we slip, it all happens so quickly,

but what exactly do our bodies do

when our feet disappear from under us?

Well, we're going to find out with the help of two volunteers.

We've got Chris and Rick from the Blackburn Hawks Ice Hockey Club.

-Now, you're both padded up, aren't you?

-Yes, we are.

Got your helmets on. But they don't have their skates on,

we've stuck them in normal shoes

and in the name of science, not to laugh at you,

we're going to ask you

just to walk across the ice and see what happens, all right?

-Yeah.

-Away you go.

'Ice is up there with the slipperiest things known to man.'

'In some cases, the stuff on non-stick pans

'and, oddly enough, knee cartilage, can be slippier.

'But that's not much consolation to Chris and Rick.'

'Still, they've provided an interesting case

'study for Polly McGuigan, a biomechanics expert who

'actually studies falling over and how we avoid it.'

Obviously, I watch this and laugh because it's funny. What...

I mean, you laugh as well, but what else do you see

when Chris goes flying?

You can see as this foot hits the ground, he loses friction,

his foot goes off to the right and his body falls to the left.

If the foot had gone out in front of him,

he would have gone backwards.

If the foot had gone to the left-hand side,

he would have fallen to the right.

You fall in the opposite direction to the way that your foot slips.

When you put your foot on the ground,

you're exerting a force against the ground

in order to support your body weight.

What happens when you are walking naturally is,

your heel hits the ground and your leg's sort of at an angle like this,

and at the point at which your heel hits the ground,

you need some resistance

from the surface that you're walking on to keep your foot there.

If you're on a slippy surface, there is the potential

that your foot's just going to keep going.

One thing that I've spotted when Chris did this is,

just at the moment that his foot goes there...

the foot that he could use to recover is actually quite high up,

so to get that back for the balance, which is what you're saying,

to recover from the slip, is very difficult.

You can see that he's trying. He's bringing this right foot over

more to the left-hand side of his body,

so he's trying to get some form of weight support

on that side of the body to push it back upright again.

But as you say, it's very, very difficult

and it happens very quickly.

And human instinct as soon as you slip is your arms out like that

to get any kind of balance. Does that work?

Well, evidently... Evidently not!

It will help with your balance,

but also there is a natural instinct to save yourself.

'It's this instinct that leads to so many wrist injuries when it's icy.'

So in some ways, is it better to be flat-footed

rather than go heel first?

Yes. And what people do naturally is, they tend to shuffle on ice.

They tend to keep their feet on the ground

and move one foot in front of the other,

so we don't have the business of having to pick your foot up

and put it back down again.

'Shuffling might stop you going to hospital with a wrist injury

'when it's icy...'

-WOMAN:

-Are you all right?

'But we can't go around like that all the time...'

'Which is why slippery floors are such a menace.'

'Slipping and tripping is the single most common

'cause of injury in UK workplaces.'

For the insurance industry, slips and trips is a very big deal indeed.

Every year, a million working days are lost to businesses,

and it costs businesses around £500 million

in terms of lost production costs with employees and insurance claims.

'With money like that flying around, it can be very

'important to know just how slippery a surface might be under foot.'

There are actually people who can tell you very precisely

just how slippery a floor is,

and not only that, but why it's slippery,

and one of them works here,

'Ceram, in Stoke-on-Trent.'

This is a ramp test, and this is just one of the tests

that we use to determine our slippier surfaces.

'Lisa Cobden is a Slip Consultant.

'She's going to show me that the slipperiness of a floor is

'more to do with what's on it than what it's made of.'

'By stringing me up and putting me on this tilting contraption,

'Lisa's going to get me to test three of the most common floor

'surfaces in our homes and workplaces:

'Laminate, high-glossed tiles and carpet.'

-How's that?

-That's fine.

'The angle I lose my grip on the slope is a measurement of how

'slippy the surface is.'

Oh! Whoa! Ah!

You're taking quite a sadistic pleasure from this one, aren't you?

'And lets us compare the three floors.'

'Surprisingly, they're not very different.'

33.2, compared to 32.8 for the laminate flooring.

-Really?

-Mm-hmm.

'You'd expect the rougher carpet to be best,

'but why did the other two perform so well?'

I'm surprised, even though it's only half a degree,

that the shiny tile went steeper than the laminate flooring.

If you think of any surface as a series of peaks and troughs,

and the smooth surface

actually hasn't got very many of those peaks and troughs,

and therefore, you get very good contact

between the shoe and the surface,

and that means that you'll stay in an upright position

even though the angle of the tile is quite high.

'Magnified thousands of times, these peaks and troughs are revealed.'

'On smoother floors, the peaks are more even

'and there's fewer troughs.

'That means there's actually more surface area

'for your foot to make contact with,

'meaning more friction and more grip.'

'The same goes for flatter shoes,

'so ones with a deep tread aren't quite as grippy as you'd think.'

That, as a shoe, or the sole of that shoe,

looks like it's got plenty of grip on it.

This would be good for a relatively soft surface

where you actually sink into it, something like mud,

because it would sink into the surface

and you get an interlock between this tread

and the surface that you're walking on,

whereas on the tiled surface,

you're simply only walking on these areas

and it's cutting down the contact area

between the shoe and the surface,

which produces the friction.

With the trainers, the whole of the sole of the shoe

was in connection with the surface.

'But Lisa's about to introduce an extra factor.

'So far, I've only been on clean, dry floors.

'Get them wet, and things change dramatically.'

See how floors react in different conditions.

So, that's gone at 11.2.

'That's not even half the measurement

'for this floor when it was dry.'

Wow, that makes a very, very big difference, doesn't it?

It's a huge difference.

And these tiles are obviously used in people's kitchens,

people's bathrooms, they're the two rooms they're predominantly in.

So if I mess the washing-up up a little bit

and water comes out of the sink,

then as soon as that film of water will go on the kitchen tiles,

it changes that surface.

And it only needs a very tiny film of water,

about two thousandths of a millimetre.

Two thousandths of a millimetre?

Two thousandths of a millimetre. On a smooth surface.

That kind of measurement can only be seen under a microscope.

It's tiny, it's tiny.

But with the smooth surface, effectively, you're walking on water.

Not for very long.

'And it's not only water that can contaminate an otherwise

'slip-free surface.'

People often don't think about dust being a contaminate

that will cause you to slip, but actually,

dust acts like a series of small ball bearings,

and so effectively, if you have a layer of dust on the surface,

it's like walking on a layer of ball bearings,

so again, you're likely to slip.

So if we were going to boil it down then, as long as a floor,

whatever it's made of, is clean and dry, we shouldn't fall on it?

That's pretty much it.

In 99.9% of cases, the slip's actually caused

by some form of contamination.

'And that's the thing all these accidents have in common.

'But beware, surface contaminants come in all shapes and sizes.'

That works, doesn't it? That works.

It's not just me and Elmer Fudd.

'All over Britain, mayhem abounds.'

LAUGHTER

'And with video cameras everywhere these days,

'there is a staggering amount of it being filmed.'

In the last hour, we've categorised and analysed

'125 mishaps from all corners of our lives.'

'From the simple, but embarrassing acts of walking into things

'while distracted...'

'to the times when we deliberately go head-first

'into ruin without thinking it through.'

'From the true devastation that can result from a simple mistake...'

'to times when we really should know better.'

-WOMAN:

-What are you doing?!

We are never far from disaster.

So we should all take care out there and keep our cameras handy.

GLASS SMASHES

-BOY:

-Don't tell, don't tell.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd