Sorry about the poor quality of that picture. I took it with my cell phone a few minutes ago. It's late on Sunday evening. I was sitting at my computer here in my home office at about 11:15 pm when I heard a series of loud thumps and smacks outside.
Tomorrow morning is garbage and recycling pickup day, so most of our neighbors have big bins sitting on the curbs. I assumed the noises I heard meant that a car had sideswiped one of the bins and sent it bouncing a few feet, but what I heard sounded much louder than that. Fearing that one of my own bins had been struck and I'd have a mess in the street to clean up, I looked out the window.
I saw what I first thought was a one-car accident: a car seemed to be resting at an odd angle near the curb across the street. But it looked a little ... strange. I walked outside and took a few steps into the darkness before I realized why: the vehicle was upside down. Apparently it had plowed into a small tree and somehow had flipped over.
The dome light inside the car was on. I hurried over, and as I did so, a guy's head emerged from the other side of the car - apparently he had climbed out the front passenger side. Young adult. He was standing, and seemed to be walking and talking with no problem. I asked him if he was okay, and he said yes. I asked him if anyone else was in the vehicle; no. What happened? He was driving, he swerved, he hit a tree. What caused him to swerve? He didn't really answer. Told me he was 100% sober; I reserved judgment, thought there was some booze on his breath but otherwise he didn't seem obviously drunk. He said, "I better call Triple A. Sh*t, this is all I need." I let him know that my wife had called 911; I couldn't tell if this was good news or not in his world.
There didn't seem much more to say, so I trudged back toward my door. My next door neighbor was standing on his front lawn by then, so I went over the facts with him. He nodded and said, "I'm going back to bed." By that time, about six police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance and the rescue squad had arrived. I thought maybe they would give the driver a roadside sobriety test, but I waited around for a while and nothing much happened, so I snapped the photo and came back inside. As I started to write this, I heard a truck engine, and then a sort of ker-plunk; glancing out the window, I saw a flatbed, and the car was upright again. Not sure how they flipped it back over.
The great mystery is, How did the driver manage to flip a car all by himself on this suburban street? I guess when he hit the tree, maybe the vehicle somehow started to climb it, and then pancaked over; it's all I can figure. My wife speculates that he was probably going pretty fast.
The street I live on is extremely quiet at this time on a Sunday night, but I'm just a couple of hundred yards from a busy intersection, and there is quite a bit of traffic during the daytime, especially during rush hour. I'm here all day every day because I work from home, and a few times every year I hear a smack!, sometimes preceded by a squeal; these are multi-vehicle collisions. Whenever I hear a collision, I always go over to the scene. Not that there is much of anything practical I can do. I don't have any first aid skills to speak of, except to advise injured passengers to stay inside the vehicle, something I picked up once from an insurance person. I can call 911 - I often do that. I've been what I hope has been a sympathetic ear to people who are freaked out that they've just wrecked their car. I have sort of a calm demeanor, and I think once or twice I've been able to calm down someone who was angry at the other party.
I'm too tired to come up with a spiritual lesson to all this. Just thought you'd be interested.
It's a shame the self driving car thing doesn't seem to be working out. People as drivers seem to be getting crazier and dumber. When I get a green light, I look both ways before proceeding.
ReplyDeleteI think I've mentioned before: I would love to have a self-driving car. And I'm sorry to hear it's not working out. I thought the technologies were actually advancing pretty quickly.
DeleteSo did I, Jim. I originally thought it was impossible but then was surprised by the advances. But then these goofy accidents started happening. I think that the situation where the car drives itself while the human monitors is even worse. Who can do that without going into a fugue?
DeleteI think it's too early to write off self driving cars. They are getting the bugs out. Like you say, the human monitoring it is a difficult situation, I can see going into kind of a hypnotic state. Probably best to develop the car's AI. Says the world's worst control freak.
DeleteAs I get older, I'm becoming conscious of my diminishing powers as they apply to driving: my eyesight and hearing get a little worse, my reaction time slows down. The first 15 or so years I lived here, I had an elderly next door neighbor, a rough, gruff widower in his 80s who valued his independence. One day I saw him in his driveway, he was pretty upset. He said that someone had hit him and then driven off when he was out driving around earlier that morning. A bit later, the police arrived, and I stood with him while they questioned him. It soon emerged that the police officer's understanding of the accident was quite different from my neighbors: the officer had already interviewed the other party and inspected both vehicles, and his conclusion was that my neighbor had caused the collision and the other party perceived that he had driven away without stopping. I don't think my neighbor was trying to pull a fast one; I think he honestly was confused about the circumstances. He fulminated for a while, but I perceived that lying beneath his grumping was fear: 'What is wrong with me, that I got this all so wrong?' It wasn't long after that that his kids and grandkids prevailed upon him to go into assisted living. I'm a long way from that (I hope), but I do see that driving requires faculties that decline with age.
DeleteFormer Gov. Jeb Bush formed a company with a former Google engineer and former Ford computer guy (or maybe the engineer was from Ford), and they were going to have self-driving cars for use, on-demand within 40 minutes, and my county is supposed to be one of the first test places. All of this was going to happen within four years. The announcement was two, maybe three, years ago, and no one has heard anything since. I just renewed my driver license, which will take me to the age of 92 or so (I was required to have an eye test), but I'd really like to stop driving sooner than that.
DeleteWell, there's always good public transportation. In Germany.
DeleteFunny the conclusions one's mind jumps to. I thought at first this was going to be something about Chapaquadick (not entirely sure I spelled that right). Just because we've been speaking about people's past continuing to haunt them.
ReplyDeleteAbout cars flipping over, the first thought that came to my mind was over-correction. Happens a lot here this time of year, people see a deer and swerve to miss it, and flip. Probably not too many deer in your neighborhood, but he could have swerved suddenly for some reason.
Bless you for being a good Samaritan. A lot of people would have been too afraid to go out and render aid.
My house is just past a tight 90° curve. They used to go straight into my neighbor's lawn until they lined their property with big boulders. Now they manage to make it around the bend and go off on my hedgerow. Cars frequently flip over at an intersection near me. The physical explanation is that they speed up a steep slope and leave the ground when it suddenly levels off.
ReplyDeleteA lot of stuff can happen to your car when you are texting your friends while driving...
ReplyDeleteI run toward crashes armed with clean bath towels and a blanket while Raber calls 911. I have a high tolerance for gore and injury from working in the ER as a young person.
Even if someone seems fine, it is advisable to stay with them in case they've sustained an internal injury you can't see. The adrenaline from the accident often renders them impervious to pain for a short time. They may also be dazed from a tunk in the head and wander around in the road. Get them to sit on the curb and keep them talking until help arrives. If they're shivering, get them covered up in case they're shocky.
Jean, I didn't know you had an ER background, are/were you an RN or something similar?
DeleteNo, just a clerk. I worked in hospitals from age 18-24 when I was going to school, and floated around to different areas a lot.
DeleteWhen I was pretty well seasoned, I sometimes worked the ER overnight shift, and the weird stuff you'd see on a Saturday night from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. could fill a book. Tip: If you are 14, Saran Wrap and a rubber band will not make a good condom substitute.
My job was mostly to get families settled in an appropriate area so the docs could work, be comforting without really saying anything, and wake up surgeons in the middle of the night. I also fetched, carried, and and did emergency runs to the lab or pharmacy and held the occasional hemostat.
Lots of screaming, projectile vomiting, bleeding, seizuring, and etc. would walk in the door. So even us clerks had training so we we could respond and knew enough not to tell somebody who was pale and sweaty with chest pain to "have a seat, it's probably gas."
I learned to pray while working on the cancer ward.
I could not handle pediatrics. It was just too damn sad.
Six squad cars, a fire truck, an ambulance and the rescue squad?!?
ReplyDeleteBoy, they coddle you folks in the western boonies. Friend of mine got T-boned by a Stop-sign runner. He called 911, and the rescue EMS showed up, got all the details and turned them over to the cop when he finally got there. Then took my friend to hospital for checkup. His blood pressure was high; he had paid off his car six days earlier.
Driver of the other car said he stopped at the stop line -- and pointed to the center line of the road my friend was on. "Florida Man learns where Stop sign means stop."
Yeah, I thought it was kind of an over-reaction. But yes, that is what happens around here. Frankly, there is not typically a lot of call for the services of the public service employees (e.g. we don't get many fires around here), so they have the luxury of erring on the side of over-dispatching. And I suppose, when the 911 dispatcher is told "car on its roof", s/he has some sort of risk assessment guidelines that say, "alert everyone". At least the SWAT team didn't show up. And after standing around and admiring the car for a few minutes, at least half of the arrivers packed up and left. If it had happened during the daytime, most of the police would have been deployed to do traffic control, but at 11:30 pm on a Sunday night in our burgh, everyone is asleep.
DeleteFire always routinely responds to car accidents here because the guys are trained in dealing with gasoline spills and what not. Also, car fire hazards.
DeleteBut six squad cars. Sounds like a slow night at the cop shop.