(Texting Woman Falls Into Canal) – We all knew texting while driving was dangerous, but after one texting woman fell into a canal it seems like texting while walking is equally as dangerous.
Sometimes we just can’t wait to see what crazy gossip our friend is texting us or what hilarious photo has been forwarded to our phone in a massive chain text, but for Laura Safe the anxiety to see what her boyfriend texted her could have landed her in the hospital.
Capital FM Radio personality Laura Safe was headed to a shopping center in Birmingham when she got a text message from her boyfriend.
As she began her descent down the stairs that ended just a few feet into an icy cold canal she decided then was the perfect time to reply to the text message.
She explained that in the corner of her eye the canal didn’t look like freezing water at all.
“I thought ice on the canal was pavement because it looked dark in the corner of my eye,” Laura said
Needless to say, it certainly wasn’t pavement and Laura walked right into the canal where she had to be rescued to avoid the damaging effects of hypothermia.
A surveillance camera just a few feet away caught the hilarious tumble and heroic rescue from a good Samaritan.
The Sun reported that a businessman by the name of Neil Edginton tried to warn Safe that she was headed towards the canal, but when his warning came too late he sprang into action to rescue the radio personality.
“[I] realized her focus was on her mobile phone and that she was going to walk straight into the water,” Edginton told The Sun. “I shouted to her to stop but it was too late. I dropped my phone and ran over to her. I had to lay down on the side with my arms in the water because she was submerged and pulled her out.”
The heroic bystander did manage to get to her before she suffered any serious injuries, but the plunge was enough to teach her a lesson about texting while walking.
“I’m a lot more cautious,” Safe added. “I don’t text any more. I’m too scared.”
Now that she is dry again, she seems to be taking the whole incident in stride and even made a few jokes about her own clumsy behavior.
“Oh dear. I should really be called Laura UNsafe after the day I’ve had! Lol,” she tweeted after the incident.
She later thanked her hero during an on-air broadcast before heading off for a ski trip vacation.
We know what you’re thinking, the last thing she needs to do is hop on a pair of skis right? Well apparently some of the executives she works with were thinking the same thing.
“We’ve sent her off with a lot of padding,” said Gaynor Martin, the program administrator for the station.
This texting woman’s fall into the canal is only the latest in the string of texting while walking victims.
A woman in Michigan took a nasty fall off a pier after she got absorbed into her text messages. Even a Georgia State Student received a broken nose after walking face first into the concrete wall of a parking deck in Atlanta while going through their smart phone. But before you say anything us Americans being the only ones too wrapped up in our technology, remember that a young girl in China walked right into a sinkhole while she was texting and walking.
We probably won’t be seeing any TWW (texting while walking) laws come about because of this since the people texting aren’t hurting anyone other than themselves, but we would like to warn everyone that you may not be as good at multi-tasking as you think.
Think about that next time you decided to text and drive walk.