Broken spine/neck is a common injury at Chopes. Basically, the way this wave works is that the open ocean swell goes from deep water and hits a wall, so all that energy goes straight up. It causes a strong suction on the water in front of the wave, and it's very shallow water to begin with - on a big day, that wave is breaking into water that's only a foot or two deep. You basically have the whole ocean stacking up against that suction, and once the reef is drained out and there's not enough incoming current to hold up the stacked water anymore, the whole thing folds over from the top, so now you've got a slab of water that's at least ten or fifteen feet thick getting shoved out in front of the wave.

You have zero control over the orientation of your body when you get sucked into the slab, so you might impact on your feet or on your neck or on your back or on your face. And there's no space between the surface of the water and the floor, maybe a couple of feet at most - for all practical purposes you're being pulled thirty feet straight up and hammered directly into a layer of rocks with a thousand tons of water slamming in on top of you, then you get to take a trip through a washing machine spin cycle that rakes you over the sharp coral for about a hundred yards.

The problem is really the weight of it all. That wave is a few hundred million pounds of water and you don't weigh anything in comparison; if you fall in, you become part of the wave. Just look at the exploding whitewater in any thick wave and think about the forces involved. Even if the water was very deep and you weren't running headlong into the floor, a trip through the whitewater at Chopes is enough to break bones, hyperextend joints, and basically pull your guts apart whether you're ready for it or not.

It's a place where it's very, very, very easy to get killed if you don't know what you're doing, and only slightly less easy to get killed if you do know what you're doing.

Edit: grammar, info