"floor polishers jammed deep inside"

In almost every case, he said, the problem was what he called "pilot error" - personnel who let ferromagnetic objects into the room or failed to detect them in scanned patients.

This would be much more impressive if captured on video, but it's strange nonetheless:

The pictures and stories are the stuff of slapstick: wheelchairs, gurneys and even floor polishers jammed deep inside M.R.I. scanners whose powerful magnets grabbed them from the hands of careless hospital workers.

Hospital monitoring equipment sucked into an M.R.I. scanner.
The police officer whose pistol flew out of his holster and shot a wall as it hit the magnet. The sprinkler repairman whose acetylene tank was yanked inside, breaking its valve and starting a fire that razed the building.

But the bigger picture is anything but funny, medical safety experts say. As the number of magnetic resonance imaging scanners in the country has soared from a handful in 1980 to about 10,000 today, and as magnets have quadrupled in power, careless accidents have become more frequent. Some have caused serious injuries and even death.