In a macabre moment frozen in time, Carl Lucas stared as a PTO shaft devoured his shirttail and pulled him toward the edge of horror. Blink to a blur, the spinning steel sucked Lucas off his feet and jerked the Alabama farmer into its orbit, mangling flesh, smashing bones, and rag-dolling him through at least three terrifyingly contorted revolutions.
Despite 72 years in the field, consistently surrounded by the hazards of agricultural work, Lucas was caught in an unguarded moment and knew the plain truth: What the PTO gets, it keeps. Simply, PTO accidents result in some of the most ghastly injuries and deaths in farming. Yet, Lucas’ unlikely survival is directly attributable to the speed of reaction from his farming brethren, superb medical care, and most of all, he insists—the hand of Providence.
“Age ain’t got nothing to do with safety,” he says. “I don’t care how long or little you’ve been farming, the PTO don’t care. Listen to what happened to me and take a minute to think about your own safety and your family.”
The Ordinary Day
Roughly 20 minutes west of the Mississippi line, Lucas grows 600 acres of corn and soybeans in northwest Alabama’s Marion County, just outside Hamilton. Marion County is a mix of low hills and flats, fostering pockets of modestly-sized fields—150-acre stretches to 20-acre patchworks.
On Nov. 26, 2019, at the tail-end of harvest, Lucas kicked off the day in routine form, as a true creature of habit. He stirred at 5 a.m. and suited up a 5’11”, 230 lb. frame in his standard farming fare of work boots, ball cap, t-shirt, blue overalls, and a thick Carhartt buttoned shirt thrown over the top to serve as a jacket. Lucas drove to a local café, and tucked into breakfast and coffee, alongside his morning companions, Wade Rollins and James Fowler—both pushing 90, and pillars of the breakfast scene. Two pots of coffee later, at 7 a.m., the fellowship broke apart, and Lucas headed for the farm, raring to bag deer corn. “It was a day like regular—ordinary as you could get. I always leave the café about seven o’clock or so, and get on my tractor to plant, spray, or check rows, and I’m usually solo, just me.”
Truly. On almost every other day of the farming year, Lucas ran solo, but in order to load bags of corn, he needed help. That requisite help kept Lucas from bleeding out on the ground of his farmyard and enabled him to endure the most physically agonizing day of his life.
Shatter the Moment
By noon, with dry, blue skies and temperature nearing 70 F, Lucas was in the middle of an ideal work day, alongside Danny Ray, 61, and Johnny Ray, 73, and young Derek Palmer, 17. The four-man crew got machinery and logistics in line, grabbed a quick bite to eat in town, and returned to ramp up the corn bagging process. Danny Ray moved equipment in the distance as Johnny Ray, Palmer, and Lucas took up central roles.
At the rear overhang of Lucas’ main shed, on gravel, a John Deere 5390 tractor connected to a PTO shaft which propelled an auger used to fill a grain tank from a dump trailer. Palmer was perched on a ladder, 12’ off the ground, in order to signal once the tank was adequately filled with corn. Lucas and Johnny Ray took up positions behind the opposite rear wheels of the tractor, separated by the revolving and uncovered PTO, likely spinning at roughly 540 rpm. It was a bucolic scene on an otherwise ordinary afternoon at 2 p.m., played out dozens of previous times in Lucas’ life, but a single mistake from the veteran farmer was set to shatter the moment.
Stars and Blackness
“I never knew I was so close to the PTO,” Lucas recalls. “I’d unloaded crops for dozens and dozens of years, and suddenly all that experience meant nothing. I’d never even had a serious accident on the farm; not one. I thought I was healthy and safe, but not this day.”
In order to get a better look at the corn’s movement, Lucas leaned out—shirttails dangling—as the PTO latched onto the fabric with a fell grip: What the PTO gets, the PTO keeps. “It had me before I knew what happened and for a flash I tried to hold myself back from it, but I couldn’t because it was gonna eat into my stomach.”
In a blink, Lucas’ body was ripped off the ground, over the shaft, and into the steel revolution of a PTO spinning at almost nine times per second. “It was just a blur of spinning, maybe I went around three times at a speed so fast I can’t describe. I remember my head taking a powerful crack, and seeing stars and blackness.”
Astoundingly, the PTO contorted Lucas’ body into a twist through three turns, tore off his clothes, and ejected him several feet through the air, slamming Lucas on his back between the tractor and the auger. Landing in farmyard gravel, stripped of all clothing but workboots and underwear, Lucas lay in a bloody heap—by all reasonable assessment a dead man.
“I Knew Better”
Johnny Ray, standing beside the opposing rear tractor tire, was roughly 6’ away when the PTO grabbed Lucas. “I saw Carl walk forward. First thing I knew, his shirttail got caught, and he spun three times faster than you could blink. I’ve been around farms all my life and seen accidents, but this was the worst I’ve ever seen. Carl was standing there one second and gone in an instant.”
Action. Action. Action. “There is no time to think in a situation like this,” Ray says. “Your body takes control and acts for you. I knew one thing immediately: Time was running out fast because we were playing against the clock with everything that happened next.”
A military veteran with 40 years of Alabama National Guard experience, a tour in Iraq, and medical training, Ray raced for the cab, shut down the PTO, and ran back to Lucas’ seemingly lifeless body. “Carl was laying flat,” Ray notes, his cadence slowing and tone dropping as he recalls the scene. “He had no clothes. No arm. His skin was going gray.”
Initially, Ray feared his long-time friend, Lucas, was dead. “I got to Carl, and he opened his eyes, and said, ‘I knew better than this.’ He was still lucid and that’s when I knew he was going to make it if we could get the blood stopped.”
Lucas pulled out of the haze and focused on a surreal sight: “I could see all my clothes over there still on the PTO, and I didn’t even know exactly what had just happened, but I knew what I was seeing on the PTO. I was looking at my arm.”
“It’s Off”
Roughly 20 yards away from the tractor, Palmer was on the ladder, looking back over his shoulder, and had clear line of sight to the accident. “I saw Carl’s shirt get caught, and for just that split-second I hoped he could grab onto something and his shirt would tear off, but it was impossible. The PTO was too strong and fast, and he fell right in, and went around at least three times—could have been more.”
Palmer was raised on his family’s Marion County cattle and hay operation, and he had worked on the side with Lucas since age 15—but nothing prepared him for the trauma of Nov. 26, 2019. “I’ve never seen anything so terrible and I’ve never been so scared, but I jumped off the ladder and ran over as fast as I could go,” Palmer details. “Everything was a blur of emotion, kind of like things were moving fast and slow at the same time.”
Scrambling to Lucas’ side, Palmer arrived just after Ray, who assessed Lucas’ condition, and shouted above the din of machinery at his first cousin, Danny Ray: “Call 911 and get a MedEvac crew flown in now.”
Despite Lucas’ traumatic condition, the Alabama farmer had a major proximity issue in his favor: He was 12 miles from Hamilton and only a mile from a crop duster landing strip. Danny Ray dialed emergency, reported the accident, and requested a helicopter. The operator, not realizing the severity of Lucas’ condition, denied air evacuation and insisted on an ambulance assessment. Danny Ray, desperate for a response, screamed into his cellphone: “His arm is gone. It’s off.”
A Shattered Body
Johnny Ray pulled a knife and cut a strip of t-shirt cloth from the cluster of garments wrapped in the PTO. Lucas’ arm was severed halfway between the shoulder and elbow, and Ray was uncertain if he could gain tourniquet access at the pressure point beneath Lucas’ underarm. Ray and Palmer took opposite ends of the t-shirt strip, formed a knot, and pulled with every ounce of strength the pair could muster, successfully securing the tourniquet below Lucas’ underarm to stem blood loss.
“We were working as fast as we could,” Ray remembers, “but it’s a hard thing to tie when you’re trying make a knot tight enough to stop blood and you’re just using your hands. I estimate we had the blood stopped within two minutes or very close.”
“My mind jumped to my wife, Glenda,” Lucas says, “and then all I could think of was getting to a doctor, and I had no thoughts of death and felt no pain,” his voice trailing to tears as he recalls the care from his friends.
“Lemme tell you, if it hadn’t been for the quick-thinking Johnny Ray, and Derek helping him, I’d have died that day,” Lucas continues. “The Lord was watching over me and I should never have survived that PTO accident. No way.”
Palmer unhooked the PTO and moved the tractor to afford space for the inbound ambulance. Ray and Palmer could do no more for their friend, except pray and wait on the emergency crews. Unable to move, Lucas’ 72-year-old body was broken, and survival was a slim proposition: severed arm, severed artery behind left knee, broken tibia, broken fibula, broken right ankle, multiple fractured vertebrate, fractured ribs, blood clot in neck, severe concussion, and massive blood loss.
Futher, Ray and Palmer straightened Lucas’ broken leg and wedged it with timber to ensure minimal movement. “Carl was talking and fully conscious,” Ray notes. “There was no doubt in my mind he was going to live.”
“A Good, Good Man”
Twelve minutes after the 911 call, an ambulance crew arrived, secured Lucas, and sped for the landing strip. (Palmer had pulled the bundle of clothes off the PTO, placed Lucas’ arm inside in case of a reattachment attempt.)
Watching the ambulance pull away, Ray’s adrenaline crashed and exhaustion took over. “That’s when my nerves got me. For the next two weeks, I couldn’t talk about it and couldn’t sleep. I was in a war zone for a year and thought I’d been scared, but that day was something else. I saw Carl on the ground and thought he must be dead; he wasn’t.”
Palmer wholeheartedly agrees: “Carl didn’t have no blood pressure and he’d gone gray, but he was calmer than me when they took him away. He is a good, good man and I didn’t believe that would be the last I’d see of him.”
“I never had a chance to think until they loaded him and drove off,” Palmer adds. “It’s strange because that’s the moment I realized I was covered in blood. All that time and I guess my mind had not wanted me to see how bad things were, and then suddenly, I could see blood all over me for the first time.”
Tractor Therapy
Eighteen minutes after the 911 call, a Medevac team landed on the nearby air strip, and flew away with Lucas, en route to Birmingham. Arriving at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital, Lucas’s condition was dire and he faced a further amputation on the injured leg. Doctors warned his wife, Glenda, that Lucas wasn’t expected to last through the night due to blood loss.
One-hundred and eight days later, 11 surgeries, and constant physical therapy, Lucas walked for the first time—legs intact. “If there had been no Glenda standing by my side, no Johnny, no Danny, and no Derek, I’d have never made it,” he insists.
Within a year, Lucas was back on the farm, using a custom-built platform and winch to access the tractor cab. “He’s not going to let anything stop him,” Palmer says. “He loves that tractor better than almost anything, and in a lot of real ways, the tractor work is now his therapy.”
“I knew Carl would be back doing what he loves,” Ray echoes. “Planting beans, spraying beans, disking, cutting hay, or raking hay, he’s back where he belongs.”
“Open Your Eyes”
Alone on his farm, working the rows, Lucas’ mind never drifts back to the horror of the accident or the pain of recovery. He doesn’t dream of the incident, replay the details, or dwell on the anguish. “It’s over. The Lord took care of it, and I only need to talk about it going forward to tell others.”
Lucas is absolutely certain he was ultimately spared in order to warn other farmers of dangers surrounding PTO operation. “My prayer is that my story will save another person and help another family avoid going through the same situation. This ain’t about age, because you have to watch out around a PTO whether you’re young or old. Covered or not, it will grab you.”
“If you’ve got one running, don’t step across,” Ray adds. “Don’t assume anything about a PTO. Don’t wear loose clothes or have anything dangling. A PTO is an accident waiting to happen even with a cover. If you’re anywhere around a PTO, you are in danger.”
“I’m gonna tell what happened till the Lord takes me away,” Lucas concludes. “Look at me and learn. Look at my missing arm and remember. If there is a PTO shaft running anywhere close, open your eyes.”
What the PTO gets, it keeps.
For more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com), see:
While America Slept, China Stole the Farm
Where’s the Beef: Con Artist Turns Texas Cattle Industry Into $100M Playground
The Arrowhead whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
Truth, Lies, and Wild Pigs: Missouri Hunter Prosecuted on Presumption of Guilt?
US Farming Loses the King of Combines
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Rat Hunting with the Dogs of War, Farming’s Greatest Show on Legs
Misfit Tractors a Money Saver for Arkansas Farmer
Predator Tractor Unleashed on Farmland by Ag’s True Maverick
Government Cameras Hidden on Private Property? Welcome to Open Fields
Farmland Detective Finds Youngest Civil War Soldier’s Grave?
Descent Into Hell: Farmer Escapes Corn Tomb Death
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Grizzly Hell: USDA Worker Survives Epic Bear Attack
A Skeptical Farmer’s Monster Message on Profitability
Farmer Refuses to Roll, Rips Lid Off IRS Behavior
Killing Hogzilla: Hunting a Monster Wild Pig
Shattered Taboo: Death of a Farm and Resurrection of a Farmer
Frozen Dinosaur: Farmer Finds Huge Alligator Snapping Turtle Under Ice
Breaking Bad: Chasing the Wildest Con Artist in Farming History
In the Blood: Hunting Deer Antlers with a Legendary Shed Whisperer
Corn Maverick: Cracking the Mystery of 60-Inch Rows
